"The Battle of the Books" is a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as part of the prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1704.

It depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library (housed in St James's Palace at the time of the writing), as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy.

In France at the end of the seventeenth century, a minor furore arose over the question of whether contemporary learning had surpassed what was known by those in Classical Greece and Rome.

This literary contest was re-enacted in miniature in England when Sir William Temple published an answer to Fontenelle entitled Of Ancient and Modern Learning in 1690.

William Temple was by that point a retired minister, the Secretary of State for Charles II who had conducted peace negotiations with France.

The bee answers that he is doing the bidding of nature, aiding in the fields, while the spider's castle is merely what was drawn from its own body, which has "a good plentiful Store of Dirt and Poison."

In one sense, the Battle of the Books illustrates one of the great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride involved in believing one's own age to be supreme and the inferiority of derivative works.

The other satire Swift affixed to the Tale, "The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," illustrates the other theme: an inversion of the figurative and literal as a part of madness.

However, John Ozell attempted to answer Swift with his translation of Le Lutrin, where the battle sees Tory authors skewered by Whigs.