Christopher Nolan's film has driven a national run on Homer's Odyssey, and the San Francisco Public Library's catalog shows the strain: Emily Wilson's translation is "all copies in use" in both print and eBook, borrowable only through interlibrary loan.

On the catalog page for Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, the San Francisco Public Library isn't so much offering the book as apologizing for it. "All copies in use," the record reads, under the 2018 W. W. Norton first edition. The eBook: same. The only way in, the page says, is a LINK+ request to borrow from another library system entirely.

The reason is playing a few blocks away and nearly everywhere else. Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," which opened July 17 and had cleared several hundred million dollars worldwide within weeks, has sent readers back to the 2,700-year-old poem it's built on — and the run on Wilson's version has been national. Hers was the first complete English translation of the Odyssey by a woman, published in 2018 and past a million copies sold. Library checkouts of the poem rose 217 percent year over year on Libby, the digital lending app; print sales climbed 76 percent in 2026, per Circana's BookScan. "Translations of 'Odyssey,' including mine, are flying off the shelves," Wilson told Variety.

SFGate, which first reported the local crush, put the San Francisco waitlist in the hundreds. The library doesn't publish a per-title hold count, and the exact number here couldn't be independently confirmed — but the catalog tells its own version: nothing on the shelf, nothing to download, a holds line and an interlibrary-loan form. What that queue looks like elsewhere is on the record. In Philadelphia, the Free Library counted roughly 100 people waiting on 13 print copies of Wilson's translation, and more than 525 in line for the digital audiobook.

A reader who walks up to the literature stacks at the Main Library on Larkin Street this month will find what the catalog already says: the Wilson Odyssey out, checked out to someone else, a hold to place and a wait to join. It is, for once, a very old book that's genuinely hard to get.