The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn’t read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.

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

He called it “In the Lion’s Den” and wrote it in the voice of an opinionated English-speaking mountain lion.

(He declared, “No more pickles and candy lunches for the library girls. They need three square meals eaten regularly.”)

He felt personally responsible for the intellectual health of the library’s patrons. The popularity of pseudoscience books, which he considered “not worth the match to burn them up,” worried him. Instead of removing the books from the collection, he established what he called the “Literary Pure Food Act” to warn readers about them. He hired a blacksmith to make a branding iron in the shape of a skull and crossbones—the poison warning symbol—and used it to brand the frontispiece of the offending books. He also created warning cards to insert in the questionable books. He wanted the cards to say, “This book is of the worst class that we can possibly keep in the library. We are sorry that you have not any better sense than to read it,” but he was persuaded to use a more restrained tone. The cards, shaped like bookmarks, said, “For Later and More Scientific Treatment of This Subject, Consult ______,” followed by a blank space for librarians to list better books on the topic.

By the time he left the library in 1910, Lummis had collected 760 autographs, many with sketches and notation, from the most significant artists, writers, politicians, and scientists in the world.

The 1932 list included Is Capitalism Doomed? and an exhaustive inventory of books about war. People wanted so much from the library. They wanted it to solve things for them. They wanted the library to fix them and teach them how to fix their lives.

for Warren, this directive was based in emotion and philosophy: She wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite. 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.”