Great American Institutions

The Library Book by Susan Orlean.  Simon & Schuster.  319 pp. $28.00.  ****

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but I more or less bought this one for its cover, which looks like a book I might have gotten from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh sixty years ago.  There’s even the image of a card at the back—the way we used to check out books, by signing a card and having the date stamped—bearing the names of Ray Bradbury and Susan Orlean.  I’ve always loved libraries, especially public libraries, and loved librarians; the library is one of my two favorite institutions in the world, along with the YMCA.  One place takes care of your mind, the other your body.  And they’re both cheap—in the case of the library, free—and in reach of everyone.

The aforementioned Ray Bradbury educated himself at Los Angeles’ Central Library.  He grew up during the Depression, and his family couldn’t afford college, so he resolved to read through the library room to room.  He couldn’t read everything—one of the most interesting facts in this book is the staggering number of books that libraries own—but he made a dent.  He later wrote a story about a society that believes in book burning, which he was going to call The Fireman, but decided at the last minute that that title wasn’t captivating, so he named it for the temperature at which a book burns, Fahrenheit 451.  It became one of his most famous books.

The ostensible event that compelled Susan Orlean to write this book was the 1986 fire at that same Los Angeles library, a staggering blaze that lasted over seven hours, damaged 700,000 books, and reached temperatures of 2,500 degrees.  The term perfect storm has become a cliché, but that was the perfect fire, because books shelved together were catching each other on fire, firefighters at first had trouble locating the blaze, and because of the idiosyncratic plan of the building, which had been a showplace when it was constructed but eventually became a firetrap.  The account of the fire is one of the most riveting sections of this book; most of the librarians left the building thinking it was just a drill, and that they’d be returning soon; some even left behind their purses.  They then watched in horror as smoke emerged from a window, the firefighters began to locate and fight it, and the blaze continued on and on (a major problem with library fires is that books are as easily damaged by water as by fire).  The librarians were the front line of people who eventually put the place back together again, over a period of months and years.

Susan Orlean takes this event as an opportunity to write about libraries in general, and about fires, books, arson, various weird characters.  If I could give her one piece of advice as a writer, I would say, more character sketches!  The brief sketches of various characters in this book are captivating and often hilarious, including, for instance, a Pentacostal preacher named Gene Scott who eventually staged a telethon to help replace books damaged in the fire.  He was connected to the library because, “The staff at Central Library noticed that whenever Scott preached about a particular book, there was an enormous uptick in requests for it. . . .

“He had lush silver hair and a bushy beard and wore tiny round reading glasses on the end of his nose.  He was fond of wearing headgear such as pith helmets and sombreros during his sermons . . . He often directed questions straight into the camera—questions like, for example, ‘Do you find me boring?’  While preaching, he often swore.  Occasionally, during homilies, he smoked cigars.  On other occasions, he had nice-looking young women dance on stage while he preached.  Later in his career, he was filmed for his television show preaching from the backseat of his Cadillac convertible, accompanied by some of those same young women dressed in bikinis.”

Or there was Charles Lummis, who was selected as the head librarian for Central Library around the turn of the 20^th century.  He had started off as a journalist in Ohio, and when offered a job by the Los Angeles Times, decided, of all things, to walk to LA.  “His favorite outfit was a three-button suit and trousers made of bright green wide-wale corduroy, which he wore with a red-and-black patterned cummerbund. . . . He almost always accessorized with a wide-brimmed Stetson sombrero and a pair of moccasins.  He wore these outfits for the rest of his life, including the five years he served as the city librarian of Los Angeles.”  What better man to write a book entitled Some Strange Corners of Our Country: the Wonderland of the Southwest.  Orlean opens each chapter with a series of titles that she has found at some library or other.

She thinks libraries are important not just because we get books there, but also because people gather there, for all kinds of reasons.  The homeless hang out in libraries, and librarians are aware of that fact, and embrace it.[1]  We don’t really know the function of libraries in the future, because the whole world of books is changing, but there are now public libraries that check out e-books, in vast numbers.  And of course libraries are information centers, where computers are available to the public (thanks in many cases to the Gates Foundation, which saw as one of its tasks the necessity to put libraries on-line).

The Library Book is a unique volume, which seems to skip from subject to subject at the whim of the author, but the research behind it is impressive, and page after page is fascinating.  Throughout the book Orlean keeps coming back to the main suspect in the Central Library fire, a man named Harry Peak who kept changing his story about what he had done that day, was charged with the crime but never actually tried, and who eventually died of AIDS, but she also includes a chapter that says that firefighters often say a fire is arson because they can’t find another cause, and have sometimes prosecuted people who weren’t guilty.  In any case, this book is not just about that library fire.  It’s about libraries in general, and books, and people who read, and people who gather together seeking community.  These are people I’ve admired all my life.  I’m glad to see a book about them.

My all-time favorite library experience is the time I was at the Durham Public Library on a Saturday afternoon, looking for something to read.  The place had been busy that day, and seemed in disarray, books sitting around unshelved, in carts and elsewhere.  There was one stack sitting in the middle of the floor, about waist high, and I always find stacks like that more interesting than the regular shelves.  I like books gathered at random.  So I picked up a book on the top of the pile and a woman near me said, “Those are mine.”  I looked up in disbelief.  She said, “I have five readers at home.”

I hope she’d brought a wheelbarrow.

But that’s my kind of reader, and my kind of family.  They’re the people you find at the public library.

[1] Indeed, the public library in Durham is located near one of the major hangouts for the poor and homeless, Urban Ministries (where I volunteer), but the library has been closed in recent months because they are creating a new (beautiful) building, and the downtown homeless have nowhere to go.