Guardians of the Lost Library

Infobox Comic
name = Guardians of the Lost Library

---

image_caption = Cover of story Guardians of the Lost Library from the number 13 of German comic album "Onkel Dagobert".
code =
title_orig =
hero = The Junior Woodchucks
appearances = The Junior Woodchucks,
Scrooge McDuck,
General Snozzie,
Donald Duck,
Grand Mogul
pages = 28
layout = 4 rows per page
story = Don Rosa
ink = Don Rosa
date =
first = Uncle Scrooge Adventures #27
July, 1994
inducks_id = D+92380

"Guardians of the Lost Library" is a comic book story made by Don Rosa for The Walt Disney Company. It was featured in "Uncle Scrooge Adventures" #27, published in July, 1994. In this story Scrooge McDuck, Huey, Dewey and Louie, and General Snozzie search for the Lost Library of Alexandria and discover the origin of The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook.

Comics Buyer's Guide mentioned it as possibly the greatest comic book story of all time.

Storyline

Premise

Donald Duck and his nephews go to The Duckburg Museum to see the exhibit on artifacts from the first Junior Woodchucks. Scrooge McDuck is also there to get facts from The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook but the scoutmaster refuses, on the regulation that McDuck is too old to join the organization, and only members are allowed to read its guidebook. Also the scoutmaster suspects, correctly, that Scrooge would use the information mainly to enrich himself, as he has recently done by acquiring the entire log books of the 16th century Spanish fleet to find lost treasures. Scrooge tells the nephews that he would like to find the Library of Alexandria for the same purpose. The head of The Junior Woodchucks organization agrees to sponsor Scrooge's trip in the name of science as well as lend out General Snozzie, the Woodchucks bloodhound. Scrooge and the nephews set out to find the lost library.

From Duckburg to Seville and back

They set out to Egypt, where they find Cleopatra had complete parchment copies made shortly before the burning of the library and shipped to Byzantium, Greece.

In Istanbul, modern-day Turkey, these "100,000 parchment scrolls" once were "the light of the Dark Ages for 800 years" and had "the books from the great libraries of Islam" added to them over time, but Scrooge and the nephews find they were destroyed in the 1204 pillaging of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. However, for centuries the Orthodox monks had copied them into the more modern technology of 10,000 hand-written books. This Byzantine Library of books was sacked on the Crusade by Italian knights and brought to Venice.

In Venice, these books were kept in an abbey whose library henceforth "sparked the Renaissance", inspired "Leonardo and Michelangelo", and motivated Marco Polo and his father to journey to the Orient, paying back the library by adding the Great Books from Kublai Khan's Empire of Cathay to it upon his return. The Venice library was lost in 1485 during the collaps of the abbey's bell tower, but prior to that, the rotting books had been saved by making their first typeset copy "of about 1,000 volumes".

Inspired by Phoenician accounts dating 600BCE of rich new lands beyond the Western ocean in the books, Lorenzo de Medici send a bookdealer named Crisdobal Colon in 1484 to buy these 1,000 volumes, but Colon never turned the books over to the Medici family. When Scrooge and the nephews find out that the English name of this bookdealer-turned sailor happens to be Christopher Columbus ("The plot thickens!" - "Like cement!") and that Columbus's private library is in Seville, Spain, Scrooge is pacing out the door, "already halfway across France".

In the Biblioteca Columbina, they are forced to decipher Columbus's notes hand-written in a secret, unknown code by means of the Woodchuck Guidebook, to find out Columbus had the library moved to Santo Domingo in 1498, far from the reach of the Medici and the Spanish King, but Ferdinand II of Aragon soon found out and had Columbus put into chains.

Back in Duckburg

Scrooge and the nephews hurry back to Duckburg to search Scrooge's above-mentioned Spanish logs to find out whether the library had ever been removed from the island. Apparently, Francisco Pizarro had it moved to his new capital, modern-day Lima, Peru in 1535, where beginning in 1551, the Spanish added "all the knowledge of the Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, and Olmecs". When the Spanish tried to send the library home to Spain in 1579, the ships were captured by Sir Francis Drake and as the battle had damaged his own ship, he had to go ashore on the coast of Nova Albion, founding Fort Drake Borough which later became Duckburg, for the sole purpose of burrying the library below the fort, on Kill Mole Hill where Scrooge built his Money Bin in 1902.

Hurrying into old caves and bricked gangways Scrooge never explored before below the Bin, they find a large room full of old books that were eaten by rats. In the middle of the room stands a metal case, with the emblem of the Guards of the Lost Library they first saw in Egypt, an Ibis symbolizing Thoth, the Egyptian deity of wisdom and writing, and an inscription on a metal plate by the last survivor of Drakeborough, saying that he had the library condensed into one single volume with every information no other surviving book in the world included, and had this one book sealed into this rat-proof metal box. Scrooge finds it empty.

The nephews stitch the remaining puzzle together: The British didn't find the library when they reoccupied Drakeborough, but Cornelius Coot, the founder of the City of Duckburg, found it during the late 18th century, and left the book to his son Clinton Coot, the founder of the Junior Woodchucks, who used it as a framework for the very first edition of the Junior Woodchuck's Guidebook, the only one book in the world Scrooge can't buy. This not only explains why the Guidebook made them able to follow the trail of the Lost Library all over the world with its enormous knowledge base, but also the fact the Junior Woodchuck's logo, based on the letters J and two Ws, looks uncannily like the Ibis Emblem of the Guardians of the Lost Library.

Later on Scrooge is depressed about not getting the book he has traveled all over the globe for until the boys remind him that he would have had to turn it over to Alexandria, and Scrooge excitedly comments about how much money he saved on the fine he would have had to pay otherwise for this library book overdue for 2,000 years.

Trivia

This was Don Rosa's first use of General Snozzie.

Donald's few appearances in the story consist almost entirely of sitting glued to the TV, oblivious to the events happening right in front of him.

Scrooge makes a reference to Mickey Mouse Comics not being published anymore. That was true during the time this story was first published but it was mainly used as an inside joke.

The names Fulton Gearloose and Clinton Coot were first used in this story but it was not revealed that they were the fathers of Gyro Gearloose and Grandma Duck.

This story was later used as a reference to Part 10 of "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck".

The story contains at least one historical error: It claims that Alexander the Great intended Alexandria to be the capital of his empire. Actually, he built it to be the capital of Egypt but not of the entire empire. Babylon was the capital of Alexander's empire.

In "The Lost Charts of Columbus", the Junior Woodchucks would organize a raffle to raise funds for further research based on things discovered on this story. Gladstone Gander won a fishing trip to Canada, where he recovers The Golden Helmet, allowing Azure Blue to resume his plans of owning North America.

External links

*Inducks comic|D+92380