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
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