The library offers an apt metaphor for approaching MacDonald’s literary influences. As the narrator of The Portent (1864) remarks of the ‘neglected library’ he is asked to organise, even the outside of a book can serve as ‘a kind of sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. To read MacDonald is thus to enter the library of books he himself inhabited, for few writers so openly acknowledged their debts to earlier masters and their forms. This chapter traces the works that most shaped MacDonald’s development as a writer of fantasy, particularly the German Romantics and his contemporaries John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. For MacDonald, the library of past and present writers was not a site of anxiety but a communal space of imaginative fellowship; by tending to it, he helped build a new wing for modern fantasy while extending the spiritual possibilities of the realist novel.