The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

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

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.

Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux. In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.

She said that she didn’t mind working at the library, but she didn’t count herself as a book lover. “I don’t like to read too much,” she said,

Monster

In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries.

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.

Burning books is an inefficient way to conduct a war, since books and libraries have no military value, but it is a devastating act.

All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

In fact, Perry was passionate, but his passion was exclusively for libraries, and he judged people by whether or not they shared his passion. The staff of the Los Angeles library adored him. They called him Father Perry.

Hard same

As she said in a speech to a library association in 1935, 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.”

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