Congratulations to Dr Bláithín Hurley from Central Library Waterford, whose blog post received a special mention in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026.
The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work as portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.
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| Image 1: Russian Folk Tales |
It is almost closing time, a librarian is helping a reader find a book and everything is entirely ordinary. Yet, within moments, a man will be beaten to death with that same book. There will be blood on polished floors, shattered silence between the stacks and one of cinema's most improbable weapons: a volume of Russian folklore. But that is not the story that interests me.
What fascinates me is everything else.
The librarian remains at her enquiry desk. Her directions are precise. The reader follows them exactly. The correct shelf yields the correct book. When he has finished with it, the man carefully returns it to its rightful place before leaving.
Even as chaos erupts, the library itself refuses to surrender its order.
For perhaps three minutes of screen time, cinema's deadliest assassin ceases to be an assassin at all.
He becomes simply another library user.
Order Before Chaos
John Wick has a price on his head, professional killers closing in from every direction and only minutes before an enormous bounty becomes active. He needs to retrieve something that will ultimately save his life. Where does he go? To the library, of course.
He races through rain-soaked streets beneath flashing headlights, weaving between anonymous figures sheltering beneath umbrellas before stepping into the New York Public Library.
The pace slows. The lighting softens. The noise disappears. Suddenly we are back in a reassuringly familiar world of endless shelves, an enquiry desk, a knowledgeable librarian and the quiet expectation that everyone will behave appropriately. In a world full of uncertainty, the library remains one of the few places where order still matters.
The Librarian
Popular culture has not always been kind to librarians. Too often they appear as stern guardians of silence, comic caricatures or dusty custodians of forgotten books. Parabellum does something rather different. In less than a minute it presents a librarian who is calm, knowledgeable and quietly authoritative. She doesn't hesitate. She doesn't disappear into the stacks. She knows her collection, understands the enquiry immediately and directs her reader exactly where he needs to go. Those of us who have worked behind an enquiry desk recognise it instantly.
John joins the queue without complaint. He waits his turn. When called forward, he politely asks for the volume he needs. The librarian gives clear directions and sends him on his way. It is an entirely ordinary library transaction. Yet, that is precisely what makes it extraordinary.
This may be cinema's most dangerous hitman, a man capable of dispatching opponents with almost anything placed in his hands, yet inside the library another authority takes precedence. Not the authority of the High Table, but that of the librarian. John waits. John asks. John listens. John follows instructions. And, when he has finished with the book, he quietly puts it back where it belongs.
That final act tells us something important about John Wick. Hidden inside the book are the objects he values most: a photograph of his late wife Helen, a crucifix that will purchase sanctuary with the Ruska Roma and the gold coins that serve as currency in his shadowy world. Memory, faith and survival are hidden inside a library book. Having retrieved them, he carefully returns the volume to its rightful place, almost as though acknowledging that the library deserves the same respect as any sacred space. Unfortunately, his world follows him into the stacks.
Library Sacrilege
Ernest, another assassin, approaches while pretending to be just another reader, casually reciting Dante from the book in his hands. Yet he betrays himself before throwing a single punch by placing the book face-up on the wrong shelf!
For most cinema audiences this probably passes unnoticed. For librarians, however, it is the moment the real offence occurs. Ernest's first crime is not attempted murder. It is bad shelving.
With that tiny gesture he reveals himself as an outsider who neither understands nor respects the quiet systems that keep a library functioning. It is a surprisingly clever piece of visual storytelling. One man instinctively respects the rules of the library. The other does not.
The fight that follows is everything audiences expect from a John Wick film: breathtaking choreography, astonishing physicality and a wonderfully inventive use of books as weapons. Yet I found myself distracted by entirely different concerns.
I wasn't worrying about John. I wasn't particularly worried about Ernest. I was worrying about the books. Would they be damaged? Would whole shelves be knocked out of sequence? How long would it take staff to restore everything afterwards?
When John finally kills Ernest using the hefty volume of Russian folklore, there is an almost delicious irony. The very object Ernest had failed to respect becomes the instrument of his downfall. Books, it seems, can exact their own revenge.
Why This Scene Matters
Perhaps my favourite aspect of the entire sequence, though, is what happens around the violence. Nothing.
The library does not become an action film set. Somewhere downstairs the librarian is almost certainly continuing her closing routine. Tomorrow's books still need reshelving. The work continues. That quiet professionalism is, for me, the most authentic part of the entire scene.
Popular culture shapes how many people imagine libraries before they ever walk through their doors. What I admire about Parabellum is that, almost accidentally, it offers an affectionate portrait of librarianship. The library is not dusty, irrelevant or intimidating. It is organised, dependable and professionally run. Information is valued. Expertise matters. The librarian is not the joke; she is the person who makes the whole sequence possible.
Tomorrow morning the doors will open once again. The shelves will still be in alphabetical order. Someone will be waiting at the enquiry desk. Another reader will ask where to find a book.
And, with any luck, they'll manage to put it back in the right place.
Dr Bláithín Hurley is a Senior Library Assistant in the Local Studies Department at Central Library, Waterford, and an Assistant Lecturer with The Open University (Ireland).
Her professional interests include local history, genealogy, information literacy, and the ways in which libraries, archives and cultural heritage are represented in popular culture.
Bluesky: @blaithinhurley.bsky.social
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