Bio

The Librarian is a faculty member, and so he must have once been a human wizard. A strong wave of magic, altering reality, transformed the Librarian into an orang-utan; at that time, his colleagues still remembered how he looked as a human. Back then, wizards were much too busy to help him get back to his original human form (although there is no record of his asking for help, either). After things settled down, the Librarian’s colleagues found that he liked being an orang-utan, and fought all efforts to transform him back to human. The Librarian found out that opposable toes come in very handy when climbing up the book-shelves and sorting books. Also, a very large and strong orang-utan has more plausible arguments when talking about dog-ears and overrun return deadlines. Although the senior wizards looked very hard for one, there are no rules in the university constitution forbidding an orang-utan to be a member of the college council.

All the Librarian ever utters is ‘ook’ or ‘eek’, but by now the wizards, and especially Rincewind, are so used to this that they understand the Librarian perfectly. They can even translate the merest ‘ook’ into full-fledged literary English sentences. Despite his usually easy going nature, it should be noted that the Librarian is an ape rather than a monkey and is extremely eager to correct people on the subject in uncharacteristically violent ways.