More than 9,000 books, including rare classics, have gone missing from the British Library.
Library staff insist they do not believe the valuable books have been stolen, saying instead they have been "mislaid" somewhere among its 650km of shelf space in its central London base.
On the missing list are first edition novels by Charles Dickens, a first edition of Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, plus an illustrated 1876 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
A luxury edition of Mein Kampf produced in 1939 to celebrate Hitler's 50th birthday has also disappeared.
Many older books have not been seen for years, including a 1555 edition of 12th-century Jewish scholar Moses Ben Maimon's Letter on Astrology.
Jennifer Perkins, the library's head of records, said the library only realised books were mislaid when a reader requested them but staff could not find them.
Sometimes a book was not in its correct place on the shelf, while at other times they were misplaced in rolling audits of the library's massive collection, she told The Guardian.
Many of the books were recorded as missing around the time the library moved from the British Museum to St Pancras in 1998.
