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"On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm. As one fireman recounted later, "Once that first stack got going, it was 'Goodbye, Charlie." The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library--and, if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present--from Mary Foy; who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, a pastor, citrus farmer, and polymath known as "The Human Encyclopedia" who roamed the library dispensing information; from Charles Lummis, a wildly eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, to the current staff, who do heroic work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves. Brimming with her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, The Library Book is Susan Orlean's thrilling journey through the stacks that reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books--and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country. It is also a master journalist's reminder that, perhaps especially in the digital era, they are more necessary than ever."--Dust jacket.… (more)
I am so grateful for this book. I read only a little at a time because I wanted to savor every chapter. This has skyrocketed to one of my top ten, maybe five, favorite books of all time. ( )
Starting like a true crime thriller, Orlean retells the history of the Los Angeles Public Library switching between then and now. Having been in the library myself helped, but anyone interested in libraries will learn much about the development of such an important public service ( )
Nonfiction book on history of the Los Angeles Public Library from its early days through the big fire in 1986 which destroyed a large part of its collections, including some priceless items and how it rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the old library to become outstanding in its new incarnation. Interesting with short biographies of its various librarians, also the young man, Harry Peak, who may or may not have started the fire. The book also stresses how modern libraries have become--more than a mere depository for books. Very readable. I had a special interest in this book, as a former librarian myself. ( )
The Library Book by Susan Orlean is one of the most compelling reads I’ve had in ages. The Los Angeles Downtown Central Library fire in 1986 is makes up a 1/2 of this fascinating book. Susan tracks the history of the possible arsonist brilliantly. The other 1/2 deals with the history of the Central Library from its meager beginning in the 1800’s through today. Susan lovingly writes about her love of books and libraries. There are too numerous chestnuts peppered throughout this masterpiece to include. Women weren’t allowed library cards until the 20th century. One of the head librarians made notes in books about whether they were worth reading or warning not to read the book. The calls libraries would receive asking for help is hysterical. A patron is a writer in Hebrew. He wanted to create a pun between the word for Zion and the word for penis. They couldn’t find a term for penis but the word copulate is mtsayen which helped her make her pun tsion. This is a must read. ( )
On 29 April 1986 Los Angeles Central Library went up in flames. ... Susan Orlean has a knack for finding compelling stories in unlikely places. ... Orlean uses the fire to ask a broader question about just what public libraries are for and what happens when they are lost. You might not perhaps have LA pegged as the most bookish city, yet right from its inception in 1873, the central library attracted a higher proportion of citizens through its doors than anywhere else in the US. By 1921 more than a thousand books were being checked out every hour. The reason for that, Orlean suggests, is that LA has always been a city of seekers – first came the gold prospectors and the fruit growers, then the actors and the agents, and then all the refugees from the dust bowl prairies. No one was as solid or as solvent as they liked to appear, everyone was looking for clues about how to do life better.
This was where the library came in, providing the instruction manual for a million clever hacks and wheezes. In the runup to prohibition in 1920 every book on how to make homemade hooch was checked out and never returned. Five years later a man called Harry Pidgeon became only the second person to sail solo around the world, having got the design for his boat from books borrowed from the LA public library. More mundanely, the library quickly became the chief centre for free English language classes in the city, a service that it continues to provide for its huge immigrant population today.
It is this sense of a library as a civic junction that most interests Orlean. ... Or, as she puts it: "Every problem that society has, the library has, too; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad."
“The Library Book” is, in the end, a Whitmanesque yawp, bringing to life a place and an institution that represents the very best of America: capacious, chaotic, tolerant and even hopeful, with faith in mobility of every kind, even, or perhaps especially, in the face of adversity.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. ---William Faulkner, Light in August
And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. ---Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. ---Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
Dedication
For Edith Orlean, my past For Austin Gillespie, my future
First words
Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry Peak attracted attention.
Quotations
A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press---a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time.
The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten---that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed.
Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death. It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.
Pigeons the color of concrete marched in a bossy staccato around the suitcases.
There was a sense of stage business—that churn of activity you can't hear or see but you feel at a theater in the instant before the curtain rises—of people finding their places and things being set right, before the burst of action begins.
I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.
Together we waited as the librarian at the counter pulled out the date card and stamped it with the checkout machine—that giant fist thumping the card with a loud chunk-chunk, printing a crooked due date underneath a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times.
Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.
The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.
It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.
I asked whether there would soon be library honey. Szabo said the project was likely to rise or fall on the question of whether it would serve the public good, as so many matters in the library do, but in the meantime, he was reading up on urban beekeeping.
The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don't charge any money for that warm embrace.
The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited.
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 boarded-up windows look like punched-out eyes in a blank face.
Abandoned buildings have a quaking, aching emptiness deeper than the emptiness of a building that has never been filled up. This building was full of what it was missing. It was as if the people who passed through had left a small indent in the air: Their absence was present, it lingered. The kid who learned to read her; the student who wrote a term paper here; the bookworm who wandered happily through these shelves: all gone, gone, gone. A few books were still on the shelves—books that had mysteriously been overlooked when the place was cleared out, like survivors of a neutron bomb. They made the ones that were missing have a slippery, hinted-at presence, as if I were seeing ghosts.
He had a habit of tapping his forehead after being asked a question, as if he had to jar the answer loose from a storage bin in his brain.
He kept repeating the story, adjusting it a touch each time, as if he were a tailor working on a jacket, taking in a bit of fabric here, letting out a seam there, then stepping back to consider what fit best.
By then, the city was a throbbing, thriving place, growing so fast that it erased and rewrote itself by the minute.
The expansion of the city was so rapid that it was unnerving. It had a quality of metastasis.
Book circulation in the Los Angeles system doubled and then tripled. In 1921, more than three million books were checked out—about a thousand books an hour.
During lunch hour, businessmen lined up against the walls, elbow to elbow, pinstripes to bow ties, flipping through journals and books.
In the year leading up to Prohibition, when the ban on alcohol seemed inevitable, every book about how to make liquor at home was checked out, and most were never returned.
People searching for missing loved ones sometimes scribbled messages in library books with the hope that the person they were looking for would see the message—as if the library had become a public broadcast system, a volley of calls and wished-for responses. Page margins were dappled with penciled pleas tossed into the wide-open sea of the library.
Los Angeles looked nothing like the old cities of the Midwest or the East, and its shape was spun out as if it had been created by centrifugal force rather than emerging from a hard center.
In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question.
As the investigation into the library fire zeroed in on him, Harry started rewriting his story over and over, each iteration a little askew from the one that preceded it. It was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book, taking a different path at each juncture.
The only suspect who resonated with the investigators was Harry, but the evidence against him was like mercury: slippery, shape-changing, inconstant.
"The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion."
I stepped into another portal to the future when I visited Cleveland recently and toured the headquarters of OverDrive, which is the largest digital content catalog for libraries and schools in the world.
The number is growing so fast that when I visited its headquarters, OverDrive had thirty-seven thousand member libraries and just a month later, when I called to confirm the number, it had risen by over eight percent. It might have seemed like a wild idea when it started, but within three years of its founding, OverDrive had loaned one million books, and in 2012, it had reached a hundred million checkouts. By the end of 2017, it had reached the milestone of having loaned one billion books. On an average day, seven hundred thousand books are checked out through OverDrive. The company has been so successful that, a few years ago, the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten paid $410 million to acquire it.
Perhaps in the future, OverDrive will be where our books will come from, and libraries will become something more like our town squares, a place that is home when you aren't at home.
Every time I thought I'd settled on the version of the story I trusted, something arose to punch a hole in it, and I was back at the beginning. In the end, I had no idea what was true or even what I decided to believe. I finally accepted the ambiguity. I knew for sure that once upon a time, the Los Angeles Central Library suffered a terrible fire, and a fumbling young man was caught up in it. Beyond that was all uncertainty, the life almost always is. It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more.
A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone.
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.
Last words
In the checkout line, a heavyset man with three books under his arm began a jiggling, hip-wagging dance, and people stepped around him carefully on their way out the door.
"On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm. As one fireman recounted later, "Once that first stack got going, it was 'Goodbye, Charlie." The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library--and, if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present--from Mary Foy; who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, a pastor, citrus farmer, and polymath known as "The Human Encyclopedia" who roamed the library dispensing information; from Charles Lummis, a wildly eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, to the current staff, who do heroic work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves. Brimming with her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, The Library Book is Susan Orlean's thrilling journey through the stacks that reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books--and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country. It is also a master journalist's reminder that, perhaps especially in the digital era, they are more necessary than ever."--Dust jacket.
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The Los Angeles Public Library is at the center of Orlean's tale, and she describes its history with a focus on the horrific fire in 1986. An interesting font of information about libraries, people who influenced their history and the American readers from pre-teen to seniors who benefit in remarkable ways from just plain books.
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