The Library Book

After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean had occasion to visit the Central Library, downtown. A librarian, nothing the smell of smoke on a book, referred to the fire. Orlean asked, "What fire?" and this is how her project started.

In April, 1986, a fire blazed in the library. "In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States." Orlean hadn't heard of it, perhaps because it got pushed off the newspapers by the Chernobyl accident.

In any event, this became Orlean's passion for several years, and the result is The Library Book, which is both a history of the Los Angeles library, a telling of the fire and its aftermath, including the investigation of a man named Harry Peak, and a love letter to libraries. As with most of Orleans' journalism, she is a key person in the story, telling the story in the first person, and sharing her love of libraries, as she recalls going to them when young with her mother. "This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen."

Indeed, who doesn't like a library? They are one of humanities greatest ideas, a place where you can go and hang out all day if you like, reading, researching, looking at pictures, surfing the Internet, listening to music, all without being asked for money. The nature of libraries has changed, certainly since the Internet, when the world's libraries can now be held in the palm of your hand, but they are still heavily visited, by the homeless, by parents and children, and even by teenagers. "According to a 2010 study, almost three hundred million Americans used one of the country’s 17,078 public libraries and bookmobiles in the course of the year. In another study, over ninety percent of those surveyed said closing their local library would hurt their communities. Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald’s; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one. In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books."

Orlean alternates her chapters in basically three threads: the history of the L.A. library, her interviews with the staff at the library, and the story of Peak, a would-be actor and fabulist who was suspected of starting the fire. All three threads are interesting, but I will admit I found the investigation of Peak the most interesting, and kept wanting her to get back to it.

She goes through the various head librarians, including Mary Foy, who was only eighteen at the time (and this was at a time when librarians were mostly men) to Charles Lummis, who was flamboyant, favoring sombreros and tight pants. The building was designed by Bertram Goodhue, and remains a cultural landmark, though in the 1960s it had to be saved from those who wanted to tear it down. Many libraries in the Los Angeles system have been abandoned: "Ever since, the old one, which had served the neighborhood for sixty-five years, has stood empty, settling into dereliction like an old dog settling onto a shabby couch. The sun has punished it. The fence has become almost a feature of the natural landscape; it leans like a tree in the wind and has rusted into a smudgy, earthen shade of silvery red. The tough, grasping roots of bindweed and goosegrass and mare’s tail have cracked the ground around the fence and cut a crazed pattern in the pavement around the building. The boarded-up windows look like punched-out eyes in a blank face."

Her interviews with librarians reveal a unanimous enthusiasm about their work; it makes me wish I had become a librarian. She uses punchy, vivid descriptions of her subjects, such as one man looking like an exclamation point, and "Szabo is tall and gangly, with a small, square head, a trim goatee, and a seemingly hard-to-reach boiling point. He is a master of the friendly conspiratorial wink and whisper."

I don't get to the library much, but after reading this book I feel like I should. "Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books. Destroying those books is a way of saying that the culture itself no longer exists; its history has disappeared; the continuity between its past and its future is ruptured."

I understood completely what Orleans was talking about when one is in a library. There is a kind of hush, but also a business, as the patrons and staff go about their business. Libraries are a sanctuary, really, a place of both learning and relaxation, where time seems to stand still, and the entire world's knowledge is spread before you. This book is a perfect encapsulation of that feeling, as well as a fascinating crime story.