Widely recognized during his own lifetime as the pre-eminent Anglophone codicologist, M. R. James spent much of his life in libraries. His scholarly output, over a period of some forty years, was prodigious, and at the heart of it is the series of descriptive catalogues he produced of the manuscript holdings of various libraries and collections. He also wrote ghost stories, as a kind of imaginative surplus or byproduct of the formal scholarship, to which they are intimately connected. This talk will discuss James’s many libraries, and the horrible things he found lurking in them.