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The tradition of playing harmless tricks on friends and neighbors goes back hundreds of years, and has been mentioned in literature as far back as 1392 in Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’. Many famous authors have taken their pranking off the page and into real life, as well. Virginia Woolfe participated in the Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, posing with friends as Abyssinian royals. Even the dour Edgar Allen Poe perpetrated a series of scientific hoaxes in the 1840s, including a fictional balloon trip!

From Shakespeare to Harry Potter, here are eight of the best tricksters in literature.

There are some people who value the earth so much that they're labeled “tree huggers.” There are others that love the earth so much that they are willing to kick butt for it. In honor of Earth Day, we will examine four characters who are willing to get a little aggressive when it comes to protecting Mother Nature.

Kimmy Schmidt lives and breathes The Baby-Sitter’s Club Mystery #12: Dawn and the Surfer Ghost. At least she did when she was living in the bunker. Now that she’s out and living in New York, Kimmy’s reading list has expanded to include the entire Ann M. Martin backlist. To celebrate the second season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, here are five Baby-Sitter’s Club books Kimmy would love. 

This year we thought we’d celebrate National Bookmobile Day by placing some fictional characters in charge of some real life libraries on wheels. While Kimmy Schmidt is still one of our favorite imagined librarians, we couldn’t picture her driving a bookmobile through the streets of NY without ending up in an accident. So we left her happily working in the public library as we set out on the road.

Happy 100th birthday, Beverly Cleary! Thank you so much for writing the wonderful books that have defined so many people's childhoods: Henry Huggins, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and, of course, the Ramona Qimby series.  In honor of your special day, we would like to imagine what Ramona Quimby would be like at the age of thirty.

In honor of National Library Week we thought we’d help dispel the pop culture stereotype of librarians being elderly women shushing kids. Instead, we've rounded up some awesome, real-life, librarians and library workers to follow on Twitter. Hopefully in the process we’ll also convert Leslie Knope into loving libraries like we do.