Yomiko Readman is a bespectacled substitute teacher who spends every cent she earns on books. When a weird humanoid riding a buglike monster tries to steal a rare book from her, Yomiko performs some amazing battle moves using pieces of paper as weapons. She's immediately drafted into the British Library Special Engineering Force as 'Agent Paper' and is assigned to Operation Manuscript Retrieval. It seems someone is bent upon procuring several rare volumes of a lost Beethoven text and has somehow enlisted a few of history's most extraordinary ladies and gentlemen to aid in the endeavour. From the banks of the Ganges to the burgeoning book stalls of Tokyo, Ms. Readman and her fellow operatives in Section A of Library Special Operations must tangle with the likes of Tokugawa-era scientist Gennai Hiraga, aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, and 19th century entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre in a desperate race to find the books and save the World!