Oxfordshire Libraries hails colourful April fool a big success with over 68,000 tweets

The service put out a tweet saying they were changing their displays so readers could find books by their colour, rather than titles or authors.

"You may only have believed, for a nano second at best, that we had decided to shelve books by colour but, nevertheless, viewings went sky high, with 246 'likes' and a whopping 68,348 views on Twitter alone,” a spokesman said.

Librarians said they were ‘overwhelmed’ by the reaction to the joke, which followed tradition and lasted only until 12pm that day.

The Tweet said: “We are introducing a brand new shelving system, extensively researched by world renowned bibliographical scientists, over a period of 17 years. All this to provide YOU, our customer, with the ultimate browsing experience.

The joke continued: “Extensive trials at secret locations show that there has been a 92 per cent increase in visitors.”