Alia Muhammad Baker's house is full of books. There are books in stacks, books in the cupboards, books bundled into flour sacks like lumpy aid rations. Books fill an old refrigerator. Pull aside a window curtain, and there is no view, just more books.

There are English books, Arabic books and a Spanish-language Koran. There are manuscripts, some hundreds of years old, on the finer points of Arabic grammar and the art of telling time. There is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad from about 1300. All told, Ms. Baker says, the books number about 30,000. And then there are the periodicals.

These books are fugitives, and Ms. Baker, a 50-year-old librarian in stout shoes, is the engineer of their underground railroad. As the British forces stormed Basra in early April, she spirited the volumes out of the city's Central Library, over a seven-foot wall, to the back room of a restaurant and then later into trucks to carry them to her home. Even friends and library employees have been enlisted as caretakers for troves of the books.

The books constitute about 70 percent -- all there was time to save -- of what was the library's collection. Nine days later, the library building was burned in a mysterious fire.