The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

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.

The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

I turned into a ravenous buyer of books. I couldn’t walk into a bookstore without leaving with something, or several somethings.

I loved the crack of a newly flexed spine, and the way the brand-new pages almost felt damp, as if they were wet with creation.

It might have remained that way, and I might have spent the rest of my life thinking about libraries only wistfully, the way I thought wistfully about, say, the amusement park I went to as a kid. Libraries might have become just a bookmark of memory more than an actual place, a way to call up an emotion of a moment that occurred long ago, something that was fused with “mother” and “the past” in my mind.

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.

On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.

this is why I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?

Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux.

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.

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.

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.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

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

People have been burning libraries for nearly as long as they’ve been building libraries.

By the end of the war, more than one third of all the books in Germany were gone.

People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society.

It’s like a ballet depicting a million little murders.

These kinds of fires became so common that most libraries now have book drops separated from the main building, so if a fire breaks out in the drop, it will have nowhere to go.

Arson is a popular crime. In 1986, the year Central Library burned, 5,400 arsons were reported in Los Angeles.

Most of them read like confessions of an almost brutal sense of loneliness, eased only by a place like the library, where lonely people can feel slightly less lonely together.

Women were not allowed to use the main facilities, but a “Ladies Room” with a selection of magazines was added soon after the library opened. Children were not allowed in the library at all.

The first time he and I met, he described, with no cynicism, an attractively dressed woman who came to the desk one day and told him she had been in the Atlantic Ocean since 1912, then had turned into a seal and swum to the port of Los Angeles.

It would be indexed and cataloged as a part of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Feathers Map Collection, one more piece of the bigger puzzle the library is always seeking to assemble—the looping, unending story of who we are.