Building a Library: What to Do When a PC Decides to Pick a Book Off the Shelf

We've all been there as Dungeon Masters.  The player characters are exploring a library, or a wizard's study, or any other sort of place that might have a shelf of books... and one of them tells you he's going to take a book down off the shelf and read it.  What's the book's title?  What does it look like?  What does it say inside?  These are all questions you can answer off the cuff, but there are bound to be dozens if not hundreds of books in a library, so what's a DM to do if the players just keep going?  (I mean, aside from telling them to stop it and get back to the fucking adventure...)

I've started doing something lately that might provide me a solution to this problem.  Whenever I read a D&D article that I feel like could double as an in-game text, I repurpose it as a book that exists in the game world.  Take Gary Gygax's series on 'Grayte Wourmes', from the Diplomacy fanzine "Thangorodrim".  I did a cut and paste job, tweaked a couple of things here and there, and the following book now exists in the game world: "Grayte Wourmes by Professor S.K. Eltolereth".  It has some lore about the nature of dragons, and some false information too because it was written based on Gary's pre-D&D ideas.  But it's okay for books to have mistakes and inconsistencies; they do in the real world as well, due to faulty research or outdated theories or any number of other factors.

I've adapted "The Battle of Brown Hills", a Chainmail battle report by Gygax.  Is it an actual historical battle in the campaign setting, or is it a fiction?  Maybe nobody knows.  "The Giant's Bag" and "Expedition Into the Black Reservoir" as well, the latter of which could provide the players with clues to what awaits them in the depths of Castle Greyhawk's dungeons.  It's a small selection so far, but I plan on gradually adding to it.  I expect Dragon magazine to be a rich source of material, especially, and I'm already thinking about stuff like the descriptions of the Outer Planes from the AD&D core rulebooks.  2e material, being as lore-heavy as it is, will be rife with potentially usable stuff.  I could provide atlases with maps of various dungeons.  There are loads of possibilities.  And if I create authorial analogues for the various writers of those articles and keep them consistent, then the setting will have recognisable named authors, each with their own style and areas of focus.

There's some effort involved, but not much really.  Just cut and paste the article, do a read-through and clean-up, tweak a few things for setting consistency (which might require more time once the setting grows and becomes more concrete).  Once I have enough, I plan to build a random table, so that whenever a player decides they want to pick a book off a bookshelf, I'll have an answer at the roll of a die.  It's a minor problem, but it's one that I've encountered enough times to be irritating.  I'm happy to be building a solution.