Upon my first visit to Apocrypha, I find The Cleansing of the Fane atop a pillar.

Why ? Why THAT book.. ?

Randomness, or (i hope i hope) an answer to a glitched quest line ?

?

You can find lots of books in Apocrypha. I do not have all the black books yet, but my question would be why could they not include the book a lot of us missed Holdings of Jarl Gjalund, that would have been helpful. Of course it could be there yet, but I am starting to think not, the books seem to be repeating themselves too much. I found more than one copy of Cleansing of the Fane.

isn't that book always on the desk in dragonsreach? pretty hard to miss imo

I think you're right about apocrypha only carrying certain books...i have about 6 copies of each poison song volume

They included the Poison Song?! Yus

Well if you go off to collect the golden claw first, or do something else rather than go straight to Whiterun, you not only miss the book, you miss the entire scene. That one book is not obtainable any other way and will never appear in your game if you do not follow Bethesda's 'planned' way to play the game. Only my third character went straight to Whiterun, which is when I discovered the book and the optional scene with Delphine. So I am still waiting for Bethesda to give me another chance for my book collector Braggen to get all the books. Apocrypha made it easier to get the new books added with Dragonborn, but so far has not solved Braggen's problem.

What? What's so special about this book?

Well my book collector cannot get all the books unless he gets a second chance to get that one. And it had some interesting translations of the Dragon language.

I would've preferred Night of Tears. Or another copy of the Atlas of Dragons, and some of the unique main quest books.

I would not mind those two, although my book collector has Atlas of Dragons the other two characters do not. I was disappointed we could not find a second copy of some of the quest books we had to hand in.