Plot
Donald Duck and his nephews go to the new Woodchuck Museum to see the exhibit on artifacts from the first Junior Woodchucks. The nephews are particularly enthusiastic about an old, worn, massive volume that is the oldest known copy of the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook.
Scrooge McDuck is also there to get a copy of the Guidebook, which he knows contains an enormous wealth of information. However, the scoutmaster refuses, on the regulation that McDuck is too old to join the organization, and only members are allowed to read its guidebook. Also the scoutmaster suspects, correctly, that Scrooge would use the information mainly to enrich himself, as he has recently done by acquiring the entire log books of the 16th century Spanish fleet to find lost treasures. Scrooge tells the nephews that he would like to find the Library of Alexandria for the same purpose. The head of The Junior Woodchucks organization agrees to sponsor Scrooge's trip in the name of science as well as lend out General Snozzie, the Woodchucks bloodhound. Scrooge and the nephews set out to find the lost library, leaving behind Donald totally oblivious to the events as he sits constantly glued to the TV, currently holding the occupation of Scrooge's Money Bin guard.
They set out to Egypt, where they find an underground chamber with a million bronze tubes containing the original scrolls of the Library of Alexandria. Unfortunately, it turns out that the scrolls have long crumbled to dust. Cleopatra had however founded a special organization, "The Guardians of the Great Library", to protect the unique book collection. Still in operation centuries later, the Guardians had complete parchment copies made shortly before the burning of the library which were shipped to Byzantium, Greece around 400 AD, to become known as the Library of Constantinople.
In Istanbul, modern-day Turkey, these "100,000 parchment scrolls" ("perhaps they left out the plays and poetry") once were "the light of the Dark Ages for 800 years" and had "the books from the great libraries of Islam" added to them over time. However, the entire collection finally perished in a fire. Yet the contents survived, since for centuries the Orthodox monks had copied them into the modern technology of 10,000 manuscripts (with each hand-written book holding 10 original scrolls). This Byzantine Library of manuscripts was however stolen in 1204 in the Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, with crusader knights bringing the books to Venice.
In Venice, these books were kept in an abbey whose library henceforth "sparked the Renaissance", inspired "Leonardo and Michelangelo", and motivated Marco Polo and his father to journey to the Orinet, paying back the library by adding the Great Books from Kublai Khan's Empire of Cathay to it upon Marco's return. The Venice Library was lost in 1485 during the collapse of the abbey's bell tower, but following the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, the rotting books had been saved in their entirety by making their first typeset copy "of about 1,000 volumes", with each typeset book containing 10 manuscripts.
Inspired by Phoenician accounts dating 600 BCE of rich new lands beyond the Western ocean in the books, Lorenzo de Medici sent a bookdealer named Cristobal Colon in 1484 to buy these 1,000 volumes, but Colon never turned the books over to the Medici family. When Scrooge and the nephews find out that the English name of this bookdealer-turned sailor happens to be Christopher Columbus and that Columbus's private library is in Seville, Spain, Scrooge is pacing out the door, "already halfway across France".
In the Biblioteca Colombina, they are forced to decipher Columbus' private notes hand-written in a secret, unknown code by means of the Woodchuck Guidebook, to find out Columbus had the library moved to Santo Domingo in 1498, far from the reach of the Medici and the Spanish King, but Ferdinand II of Aragon soon found out and had Columbus put into chains.
Scrooge and the nephews hurry back to Duckburg (where they encounter Donald still in front of the TV, making condescending remarks about their passion for "some dusty old library books") to search Scrooge's above-mentioned Spanish logs to find out whether the library had ever been removed from the island. Apparently, Francisco Pizarro had it moved to his new capital, modern-day Lima, Peru in 1535, where beginning in 1551, the scholars at San Marcos University added "all the knowledge of the Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, and Olmecs". When the Spanish tried to send the library home to Spain in 1579, the ships were captured by Sir Francis Drake. As the battle had damaged his own ship, Drake was forced to go ashore on the coast of Nova Albion, founding Fort Drake Borough which later became Duckburg, for the sole purpose of burying the library below the fort, on Killmotor Hill where Scrooge built his Money Bin in 1902 (see Fort Duckburg).
Hurrying into old caves and bricked gangways Scrooge never explored before below the Bin, they find a large crypt full of old books. On closer inspection, only the covers are left, since the vellum pages turn out to have been eaten by rats. Scrooge is furious because the library seems to have perished once and for all.
However, in the middle of the room stands a metal case, with the emblem of the Guardians of the Lost Library our heroes first saw in Egypt: an Ibis symbolizing Thoth, the Egyptian deity of wisdom and writing. An inscription on a metal plate by the last survivor of Drakeborough tells how he, on Drake's orders, had the library condensed into one single volume with every information no other surviving book in the world included. As the Lost Library's last guardian, he had this one book sealed into this rat-proof metal box. Scrooge is triumphant that the unique essence of the library seems to have survived after all, but upon opening the box he is deeply frustrated to find it empty.
The nephews stitch the remaining puzzle together: the British didn't find the library when they reoccupied Drakeborough, but Cornelius Coot, the founder of the City of Duckburg, found it during the late 18th century, and left the book to his son Clinton Coot, the founder of the Junior Woodchucks. The very volume that was on display in the Woodchuck Museum at the beginning of the story, it was used as the framework for the Junior Woodchuck's Guidebook, the only one book in the world Scrooge cannot buy. This not only explains why the Guidebook facilitated them to follow the trail of the Lost Library all over the world with its enormous knowledge base, but also the fact the Junior Woodchuck's logo, based on the letters J and two Ws, looks uncannily like the inverted Ibis emblem of the Guardians of the Lost Library.
Later on, Scrooge comments on how depressed he is about not getting the books he has traveled all over the globe for, until the boys remind him that he would have had to turn the library over to Alexandria. Scrooge gets excited about how much money he saved on the fine he would have had to pay otherwise for 100,000 library scrolls each overdue for 2,000 years, and Donald complains about the noise drowning out the TV, muttering "Cripes! They're still going on about their stupid library! As if messing with books was as interesting as watching TV! Hah! That'll be the day!"
