The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

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.

At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached

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

She doesn’t say this in a tone of self-pity or dismay but with the dispassion of an appraiser describing a universe where luck, fortune, tragedy, and disaster are meted out randomly.

He was the kind of paradoxical friend who would borrow things and never return them, and yet give you the shirt off his back.

Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.

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. In

For years, movie studios were major book-pinching culprits. Rather than simply checking out books they needed for their research—and thus having to abide by the due date—studios sometimes dispatched two assistants to the library to steal them.

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. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.

Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

with a cleft palate and a dislike of mingling.

lol what an interesting way to describe someone

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

Warren was probably the most avid reader who ever ran the library. She believed librarians’ single greatest responsibility was to read voraciously.

books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity to read. “The

Often, at the library, society’s problems are magnified.