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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.
They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.
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.
There is not a library in the world that hasn’t grappled with the issue of how—and how much—to provide for the homeless.
In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.
libraries are usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic.
World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.
To feel the need to destroy them acknowledged the potency and value of books, and recognized the steadfast Jewish attachment to them.
“There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism.
After the stock market crash, book circulation rose by sixty percent, and the number of patrons almost doubled.
In the meantime, as tax receipts dwindled, the library’s budget was cut by almost a quarter.
Chief Aguirre said as we began to walk around the building. “Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that’s something to keep in mind.”
Many are what he called “property conflict”—that is, someone got something stolen.
Another trouble spot is the Computer Center. Aguirre said it creates a lot of “time conflicts,” meaning that someone overstays his two-hour limit at a computer and someone else gets pissed.
In Religion, he gets a lot of complaints about people talking to God in overly loud voices.
One of the guards told me that his position at the library feels more like that of a psychologist or a priest than a security guard.
librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve.
“This ‘investigative’ report just shows that homelessness is a problem. Not sure what the library has to do with it.” Another commenter wrote, “I have news for everyone: This stuff doesn’t just happen at the library. Welcome to L.A.”
It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.
