The story
First used by the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) in A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought Last Friday, between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library, known as “The Battle of the Books”, which was originally published in A Tale of a Tub (1704): see the quotation.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.