He had imagined dusty bookshelves piled high with tattered volumes, priests cataloging by the light of candles and stained-glass windows, monks poring over scrolls . . . Not even close.

The dais still blazed, and in the light, Maria produced a tattered volume.

For the last couple of hours I've been recalling a picture I saw as a boy, in a tattered volume of Victorian art - it must have been almost one hundred and fifty years old.

For answer Poirot produced a little book from his pocket - an ancient tattered volume.

When he returned from town, he carried but one tattered volume.

In middle age, mainly to preserve some of the more tattered volumes in his expanding library, he began learning how to restore, and then altogether reconceive, books.

The sales staff began explaining the theory and practice of the archaic visual book while Reich slowly searched for the tattered brown volume that was his goal.

But the glass doors were cracked and the shelves only held a half-dozen tattered and spineless volumes.

There was a second book, a tattered, leather-bound volume entitled Observations on a Visit to Tear, with half its pages falling out.

The others were old and tattered volumes.