The Library Book

In the next few weeks Dear Sister Shull will be sharing a few of her choices for good reads: fiction, memoir, history, perhaps a surprise or two.  Some of the books are classics, worthy of a fresh read, and some are brand new.  I begin with a book that I bought myself for Christmas and read slowly to savor every word.  I admit, I was hooked by the title!

Orlean, Susan.  The Library Book.  Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Part history, part detective story, part memoir, The Library Book is one good book.  Orlean moves the reader from an account of the horrific fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in April 1986 both backward, to the library of her childhood, and forward to the Los Angeles Central  Library of today.  The composite picture reveals the library as an institution that is much, much more than a physical repository for books.

Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, was drawn to tell the story of the Los Angeles library fire when she first heard about it in 2011, soon after moving to LA.  She had been invited to tour the historic and architecturally renowned building in downtown Los Angeles and was duly impressed by its beauty and the richness of cultural expression represented by the building.  Toward the end of the tour her guide picked up a book and sniffed the pages deeply.  He commented, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.”  “Smoke?  From when patrons used to smoke in the library?”  “No, from the fire.”   It was then that Orlean learned about the biggest library fire in American history, one which burned for seven hours, consumed 400,000 books, damaged another 700,000, and required nearly every firefighter in Los Angeles to extinguish the blaze.  How had she not known about this remarkable event for 25 years?  When she read the newspapers from April 29, 1986 it became obvious.  On that same day the fire was upstaged by another disaster of global proportions—the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown that threatened much of the earth with radiation.

The cause of the library fire has never been determined.  Any evidence that might have led to an answer was consumed by the flames.  But that did not prevent investigators from trying to solve the mystery.  The district attorney eventually arrested a man named Harry Peak with arson, but the case was later dropped for lack of evidence.  Peak was a Los Angeles character, a wannabe actor who preened before the cameras and told many versions of his whereabouts on the morning of the fire.  Orlean treats him sympathetically and in the end concludes that there is simply no way to unravel the mystery.

The heart of the book is not the story of the fire, or even the story of the remarkable building designed by Bertram Goodhue in the 1920s.  It beats with the lifeblood of this most American cultural treasure, the public library.  Orlean manages to condense more than a century of library history into the pages of her book by weaving the past, full of characters like Charles Lummis, with the many strands of present-day library work.  In page after page I could find myself in my own library settings and identify all of the tasks, the tools, and the skills that I used in my career in public, academic, and law libraries.  With wit and humor and insight, Orlean enlarges the recounting of the library fire into a remarkable tapestry of life among the books.

Orlean spans writing styles, from prosaic details of how fires burn to exquisite reveries on the purpose of libraries.  At times as I read I felt as though I floated on a current of  memory back in time to the libraries I have loved.  It is best to leave you, dear reader, with Susan Orlean’s own words about libraries to meditate upon:

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possible know what all of it is.  I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty. [page 266]

[Senior librarian Stone] once confided to me that when he worked at a branch downtown, local drug dealers used to come to the library and ask him to help fill out their tax returns.  He thought it was a perfect example of the rare role libraries play, to be a government entity, a place of knowledge that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind.  [page 267]

[In the library] the silence was more soothing than solemn.  A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone.  The library is a whispering post.  You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen… I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.  [page 309-310]

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional.  All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise:  Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.  [page 310]