Ahh! "Basement library" should be a fixed category in all our musings on "enlivened cultural pathology". What images it triggers... :-) (And even to think about "enlivened cultural pathology" as a form of entertainment... thank you for getting my marbles kicked into motion.)

Many years back, at the university library of my town, I tried to borrow a book from the late 19th century or so, and my order came back unsuccessfully with the abbreviation "k.v." (which, as you'll notice, is the also the abbreviation of my name), standing for "war loss" ("Kriegsverlust"). At the end of the second world war, the librarians of that time swapped out some inventory in fear of looting should the U.S. Army enter the city. Well, as far as I know, the US-icans never did – they entered but didn't loot – but rather a few books disappeared on that way. (I guess the anxiety was motivated by history when in 1622, after the loss in the Thirty Years' War, the university library was ransacked by the Catholic Alliance and transported to the Vatican.) In the following decades, a lot of "evacuated" books kept being stored in such external stockrooms otside the city. I'm still kind of proud to have managed to produce such a notice. It's a rare feast.

(As far as I can remember, I was looking for some obscure investigation into a very specific (or: obscure) aspect of either the Christian cult of relics as a whole or some reliquaries in particular...) (The university library of my town has its specific collection focus on art history, other university libraries pursue different foci.)