The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

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. It wasn’t like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people’s university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.

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.

Boyle Heights, a neighborhood east of downtown. A battery recycling plant in the neighborhood had contaminated soil with toxic levels of lead, necessitating the largest lead cleanup in California history. Exide Technologies, which operated the plant, had just agreed to fund blood tests for the twenty-one thousand households in the neighborhood. The tests would be conducted at the Boyle Heights Branch Library. In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries.

Bradbury worked on “The Fireman” for a few months, grew frustrated with it, and put it aside. Four years later, the right-wing agitator Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech claiming that the State Department was riddled with Communists and “loyalty risks,” triggering a spasm of paranoia across the United States. Bradbury, who once described McCarthy as “that strange senator,” was horrified. He decided to try to finish “The Fireman,” which had eerie premonitions of the current state of politics.

The library wasn’t his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity. He began sketching, with the idea of combining the fancifulness of Spanish Revival with a more modern silhouette. Thematically, he imagined the building as a tribute to the glories of knowledge—in effect, it would be a humanist cathedral celebrating the great intellectual works of civilization. Each lintel would tell a story. All the walls would carry messages.

Humankind persists in having the desire to create public places where books and ideas are shared. In 1949, UNESCO published a Public Library Manifesto to establish the importance of libraries on the United Nations agenda. The manifesto states, “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.”