The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

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.

They were a rivering flow of humanity, a gush, and they were looking for baby-name guides, and biographies of Charles Parnell, and maps of Indiana, and suggestions from a librarian for a novel that was romantic but not corny; they were picking up tax information and getting tutored in English and checking out movies and tracing their family history. They were sitting in the library, just because it was a pleasant place to sit, and sometimes they were doing things that had nothing to do with the library. On this particular morning, in Social Sciences, a woman at one of the reading tables was sewing beads onto the sleeve of a cotton blouse. In one of the carrels in History, a man in a pin-striped suit who had books on his desk but wasn’t reading held a bag of Doritos under the lip of the table. He pretended to muffle a cough each time he ate a chip.

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. 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. After we checked out, I loved being in the car and having all the books we’d gotten stacked on my lap, pressing me under their solid, warm weight, their Mylar covers sticking a bit to my thighs. It was such a thrill leaving a place with things you hadn’t paid for; such a thrill anticipating the new books we would read. On the ride home, my mom and I talked about the order in which we were going to read our books and how long until they had to be returned, a solemn conversation in which we decided how to pace ourselves through this charmed, evanescent period of grace until the books were due.

Things are always coming in and going out of a library, so it’s impossible to know what it contains on any given day. By 1986, Central Library’s contents were valued, for insurance purposes, at roughly $69 million. That included at least two million books, manuscripts, maps, magazines, newspapers, atlases, and musical scores; four thousand documentary films; census records dating back to 1790; theater programs of every play produced in Los Angeles since 1880; and telephone directories for every single American city with a population over ten thousand. It had America’s finest assemblage of books on the subject of rubber, donated in 1935 by Mr. Harry Pearson, a noted rubber authority. It had a Shakespeare folio; a quarter million photographs of Los Angeles dating back to 1850; car repair manuals for every single make and model of automobile starting with the Model T; five hundred folk dolls from around the world; the only comprehensive patent collection in the western United States; and twenty-one thousand books about sports. It housed the largest collection of books on food and cooking in the country—twelve thousand volumes, which included three hundred on French cuisine, thirty on cooking with oranges and lemons, and six guides to cooking with insects, including the classic Butterflies in My Stomach.

In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel—in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning. Such a ratio creates an ideal fire situation, which results in total, perfect combustion. A stoichiometric condition is almost impossible to create outside of a laboratory. It requires such an elusive, precise balance of fuel and fire and oxygen that, in a sense, it is more theoretical than actual. Many firefighters have never seen such a blaze and never will. Not long ago, I had coffee with a man named Ron Hamel. He is now an arson investigator, but at the time of the library fire, Hamel was a captain in the fire department. Although over thirty years have passed, he remains awed by what he saw that day at the library. He talked about it like someone might talk about seeing a UFO. In his decades with the department, Hamel fought thousands of fires, but he said he never experienced another that was as exceptional as the fire at Central Library. Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy. Hamel said he felt like he was standing inside a blacksmith’s forge. “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell,” he said,...

The temperature reached 2000 degrees. Then it rose to 2500. The firefighters began to worry about a flashover, a dreaded situation during a fire in which everything in a closed space—even smoke—becomes so hot that it reaches the point of spontaneous ignition, causing a complete and consuming eruption of fire from every surface. As firefighters put it, it’s the moment when a fire in a room is transformed into a room on fire. With the temperature as high as it was, there was a great potential for flashover, which would have made the chance of saving anything nearly impossible.

The books that survived the fire were in piles where they’d fallen or jammed with their sticky backs together on the shelves. Olivia Primanis, the book conservator, told Wyman Jones that they had to move quickly and freeze the books because mold spores begin to bloom within forty-eight hours after being activated by water. If the books got moldy, they would be unsalvageable. That meant the staff would have to pack, move, and store seven hundred thousand damaged books somewhere cold before mold erupted.

He was a tall, beefy man with a big belly and a friendly, reddish face and silvery hair that stuck out straight, as if it were a quiver of exclamation points.

Like Harry Peak, they had the strange quality of appearing, existing, and then vanishing, leaving no residue of memory or information about who or what they really were.

One of the few places homeless people are welcomed, given access to computers and the Internet, and permitted to dally all day (unless they act out) is a public library. Libraries have become a de facto community center for the homeless across the globe. 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. Many librarians have told me that they consider this the defining question facing libraries right now, and that they despair of finding a balance between welcoming homeless people and somehow accommodating other patrons who occasionally are scared of them or find them smelly or messy or alienating. Central Library is an amble away from several large shelters and highway overpasses lined with homeless encampments. In the morning, before the library opens, many of the people waiting to enter the building are carrying their worldly goods on their backs. Szabo acknowledges the fact that the library has attained a sort of guardianship of many of Los Angeles’s street people. When he ran the library system in Atlanta, he sent bookmobiles to the motels where many homeless people lived, to offer books and story hours for the children. He included a public health nurse on the bookmobile so the nurse could check on residents’ well-being once the bookmobile had drawn them out.

The conversation then glided from Central Library to 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. They become town squares and community centers—even blood-draw locations. In Los Angeles, there have been plenty of disasters requiring libraries to fill that role.

A popular book that gets checked out often begins to fall apart in a year, so many of the books that arrive in the Catalog Department are replacement copies of books the library already owns. A book like, say, The Da Vinci Code, which is checked out dozens of times each month, is lucky to last a full year. Some books are replaced before they fall apart. For instance, baby-name books are traded out regularly. “Pregnant women don’t want to handle a grubby book, so we keep those nice and fresh,” Murphy said.

Other books have a tendency to be loaned out and never returned. The library has bought countless copies of Carlos Castaneda’s books because so many of them journey out and never come back. Another author, David Icke, who writes about his global conspiracy theories and about a race of reptilian aliens he believes will eventually dominate Earth, are ranked—anecdotally, at least—as the books that disappear most frequently. Icke has such acquisitive readers that for a while the library simply stopped ordering replacement copies of his books because it was costing too much to keep up. The day Elvis Presley died, someone checked out all of the library’s Elvis records and never returned them. The files about the Manson Family and about the Black Dahlia murder, which included clippings and ephemera, disappeared decades ago; they are essentially irreplaceable. In 1981, investigators discovered a woman selling books out of a suite in a Beverly Hills hotel. She was earning approximately forty thousand dollars a year with her used-book business. All of the books had been stolen from the Los Angeles Public Library. In 1982, ten thousand books that had gone missing from the library were found in the Los Angeles home of a library clerk named Glenn Swartz, who said he thought he had a hoarding problem. (He resigned from his job.) People have been caught trying to sneak books out in baby strollers, which sometimes have babies in them and sometimes don’t.

According to Matthew Mattson, who is in charge of it, the library’s website was visited more than eleven million times in 2015, and the catalog was browsed more than ten million times. Among the visitors are quite a few hackers. Mattson told me that he observes someone trying to hack into the library’s website almost every day. Most of the intruders appear to be based in China or Russia. Hacking into a library’s website seems pointless, since you can access it legitimately anytime, so I asked Mattson why anyone would bother. “They’re practicing,” he said. As he explained it, people hack into the library to rehearse hacking into bigger, more secure, and more valuable targets.

I left the Digitization Department and took one of my frequent walks around the building. I was just trying to soak in the place, to notice it. Sometimes it’s harder to notice a place you think you know well; your eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It’s almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.

librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”

“Well, my hero is Albert Schweitzer. He said, ‘All true living takes place face to face.’ I think about that a lot when I’m here.”

“Last week a lady called and asked me how to sign a card for a baby shower,” Princenthal said. “I mean, that’s not exactly something to look up. I just said, ‘How about . . . “Best wishes”? Or . . . “Congratulations”?’ Just off the top of my head. I didn’t consult any source. She seemed happy with that answer.” She then added, “There are a lot of lonely people out there.”

Princenthal hung up her phone and shook her head. “Why would someone call here and ask, ‘Which is more evil, grasshoppers or crickets?’ ” she said to no one in particular. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I swear some people have us on speed dial,” Brenner said, hanging up his call. “This woman—we call her ‘Fur’—she calls for spelling and grammar help all the time. She says she’s a poet. Sometimes she will call twenty-five times in an hour with editing questions.”

The library’s commitment to being open to all is an overwhelming challenge. For many people, the library may be the only place they have to be in close quarters with disturbed or profoundly dirty people, and that can be uncomfortable. But a library can’t be the institution we hope for it to be unless it is open to everyone. I attended an international conference about the future of libraries a few years ago, and everyone—librarians from Germany and Zimbabwe and Thailand and Colombia and everywhere in the world—found the challenge of homelessness and the library exasperating, intractable, unwinnable. The public can come and go, but 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. All libraries can do is try their best to manage it. On a reddit discussion of the NBC investigation, no one blamed the library for being a magnet for the city’s most troubled people. The majority of the commenters blamed the police for not being more forceful and attentive. Referring to the NBC report, one person wrote, “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.”

At that time, on the East Coast, people began tinkering with a new way of getting permission to put up buildings that were taller than what zoning allowed. Every city has height restrictions. Not every building is as high as it is legally allowed to be, but the building owns the rights to airspace above it, up to the permitted height. In the early 1960s, a Chicago developer first proposed the concept of air rights. Once the precedent was set, air rights became a salable commodity. For instance, if you had a building that was only seven stories high, which was the case with the Goodhue Building, and zoning would have allowed it to be sixty stories high, you could sell its “right” to fifty-three more stories to a neighboring building project that wanted to build higher than its allowance. Air rights withstood court challenges and were becoming a common instrument in urban development. No one, though, had tried it in Los Angeles.