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    The Library Book
    The Library Book
    The Library Book
    Ebook390 pages6 hours

    The Library Book

    By Susan Orlean

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK

    A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR * A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018

    “A constant pleasure to read…Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book.” —The Washington Post

    “CAPTIVATING…DELIGHTFUL.” —Christian Science Monitor * “EXQUISITELY WRITTEN, CONSISTENTLY ENTERTAINING.” —The New York Times * “MESMERIZING…RIVETING.” —Booklist (starred review)

    A dazzling love letter to a beloved institution—and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries—from the bestselling author hailed as a “national treasure” by The Washington Post.

    On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

    Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

    In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago.

    Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present—from Mary Foy, who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, a pastor, citrus farmer, and polymath known as “The Human Encyclopedia” who roamed the library dispensing information; from Charles Lummis, a wildly eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, to the current staff, who do heroic work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves.

    Brimming with her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, The Library Book is Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks that reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country. It is also a master journalist’s reminder that, perhaps especially in the digital era, they are more necessary than ever.

    Editor's Note

    Dazzling love letter…

    Part true-crime detective book, part history book filled with fascinating anecdotes, the newest book from Susan Orlean begins with a disastrous fire that consumed the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986 and the subsequent search for the suspected arsonist. Delight in discovery powers this book, and Orlean feeds readers’ curiosity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781476740201
    Author

    Susan Orlean

    Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and on Twitter @SusanOrlean.

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    Reviews for The Library Book

    4/5

    1,298 ratings172 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Best book I’ve read in years! It was just over 300 pages but took me twice as long to read, so full of stories and facts I didn’t want to miss one page. Page one I was hooked and the last page I read twice.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic storytelling. Incredible research.
    • 4/5
      A very readable book that tells the story of the modern library through the lens of the history the Los Angeles Public Library. If you thought libraries are dull this will disabuse you of that idea. I'm a librarian and work in a large State Library and I found myself nodding and saying "yes!" as Orlean laid open the issues ranging from the pragmatic (budgets, staffing and politics) to the eccentric (donations from obsessive collectors of maps and menus, strange reference requests, the story of the purported arsonist Harry Peak), the tragic (services to the homeless) and the dramatic (the fire itself!). I was interested to discover that drug dealing in libraries has a long history with LAPL reporting problems as early as 1926. Libraries are our shared space where no one is turned away, where all can learn and participate and this book shows us how they have adapted over time without losing this core mission. A recommended read for librarians and non-librarians alike.
    • 4/5
      I readily admit that I see the irony in reading this book without ever touching a paper page of it or entering a physical library for it. Still, brick and mortar libraries have a very fond place in my heart – their smell, their open doors, and in my day, their hushed and reverent ambiance. So I thought I would love this book about the Central Library of Los Angeles, the fire that destroyed so much inside it, and the mystery surrounding the fire. And I did enjoy it, but not as much as I expected. Sometimes my mind wandered off while I was reading or I got a bit bored with all the detail. I did enjoy some of the stories of the people involved, but didn't get to know them in depth. I also enjoyed Googling images of the library before and after the fire. Still, it didn't grab me as I expected it to. While I am glad I read it, it's not going to get on my favorites list.
    • 3/5
      Orlean describes her re-introduction to public libraries as a parent, an experience that brings back the fond memories of regular trips with her mother to the local library. Now living in Los Angeles, she becomes interested in the history of the Los Angeles main library when she takes a tour and finds out that the library experienced a devastating fire in April 1986. The cause was determined (possibly in error) as arson but a strong enough case could never be made against the one suspect, Harry Peak, a young man who aspired to be an actor and was prone to exaggeration about his life. This book could have left the Peak investigation behind. The more interesting parts of the book revolve around the library. Orlean occasionally gets into the weeds with side plots she finds interesting but the library's history, the differences of main librarians over the years, details about the fire, how the tragedy affected employees (which is only barely addressed), and the role of libraries in all communities prove to be more entertaining and enlightening than the story of a unreliable fame-seeking failed actor suspected of arson.
    • 5/5
      Orlean is an amazing writer. In this book she has made the history and librarians of the Los Angeles Public Library seem like a fast-paced novel, and turned the 1986 fire that destroyed much of the Central Library collections into a detective story for the ages. Even the science that saved so many books becomes fascinating. She weaves together the history, the librarians, the fire, the search for the arsonist, the life of the main suspect, with the cleanup and the present. Masterfully done nonfiction writing is such a joy to read!
    • 5/5
      Reading about a giant 1986 library fire in LA now counts as escapism. Orlean is a great writer who moves from the history of the LA library system to the way a fire spreads to an inquiry into the life of the guy who was ultimately blamed for (but never charged with) starting the fire. It’s a great read.
    • 4/5
      300 pages of library—and librarian—love. What's not to like?
    • 4/5
      This is a history of the Los Angeles Public Library, with a focus on the 1986 fire that destroyed a good part of their collection and seriously damaged the building. It is a great read.
    • 5/5
      I love books about books but this is so much more. It's a story of the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library that is anchored by a horrendous fire that occurred in 1986. Orlean interweaves her story with the employees, alleged arsonist, firefighters, the books and the building. Her research is outstanding and her elegant writing kept me reading. Thoroughly recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      Orlean is a nonfiction storyteller who is able to turn a library into a character that we care deeply about. The Los Angeles Public Library is at the center of her tale, and she describes its history in considerable detail, with a focus on its horrific fire in 1986. This book is also a true crime drama, since the fire was determined to be arson, with a primary suspect. To bring this homage to libraries to life, Orlean not only tells about each of the library directors since the L.A. Library's founding, but also enumerates all of the building's architectural origins and changes, as well as the political forces that have affected it. She became acquainted with many of the current library staff, and the portrait she paints of their jobs and the patrons they encounter is a particular strength of the book. This will have particular appeal to librarians and their fans.
    • 4/5
      This book would fit in several genres or areas: part non-fiction account of one of the most ubiquitous institutions in the world, part autobiography, part detective story and part paean. It is delightful, filled with interesting information and a historical foundation that makes it readable & instructive.
    • 4/5
      Nonfiction book on history of the Los Angeles Public Library from its early days through the big fire in 1986 which destroyed a large part of its collections, including some priceless items and how it rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the old library to become outstanding in its new incarnation. Interesting with short biographies of its various librarians, also the young man, Harry Peak, who may or may not have started the fire. The book also stresses how modern libraries have become--more than a mere depository for books. Very readable. I had a special interest in this book, as a former librarian myself.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful book that weaves a fire, a criminal investigation, history of libraries, the story of librarians, the history of the LA Central Library, along with the the present world of public libraries and how they are moving into the future. Public libraries are not boring depositories of books. This book examines the complex world of public libraries in an entertaining manner.

      Read this book and you will know why I love working in a library. This is where the individual and the community come together in the pursuit of learning. Enjoy.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful fascinating exploration of libraries and the people they employ and those they serve, focusing on the Los Angeles Central Library & the result of the great fire in 1986.
    • 4/5
      An ode to libraries wrapped in a history lesson disguised as a crime thriller.
    • 3/5
      Susan Orlean's, The Library Book, is well-researched and informative without being boring and droning. The author is a true kindred spirit bibliophile who really knows her stuff. (I'm thinking now of the contrast between her and Allison Hoover Bartlett, author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, who didn't seem to have a clue what it meant to be a true book lover or collector). My only complaint is my usual one...the cussing is unnecessary and makes for a negative mood.

      I found it interesting that the librarians went through such serious trauma after the fire---a mourning, sense of shock---some of them seemed almost deranged. One man said it was worse than the day his own mother had died. That was shocking to me---and I'm an avid reader, book lover, collector, and author myself. Still, I think tangible "stuff" must be put in its proper place. As much as I value the importance of information, ideas, and imagination, these pale in comparison to the importance of relationships with actual people.

      One funny thing that surprised me was the amount of crazy calls the librarians got from people asking for really random information. When the author questioned them about it, one librarian replied that many people don't have the internet or know how to use it so the logical place to find information is the library---by phone! My daughter is a part-time librarian and says she often gets strange calls, the most recent being from someone looking to buy postage stamps!

      One element of the book that I found annoying or unnecessary was the books referenced at the beginning of each chapter. I'm sure the author found some sort of parallel between them and her chapter contents but I felt they were too obscure for any obvious connection.

      Finally, as the book moved into more modern descriptions of current library offerings, I found myself feeling that crochety old lady frustration about the current atmosphere of our libraries. Even though I'm only 40, I well remember the days of the quiet library and the mean, shushing librarian---and I miss them. In my opinion, libraries now offer too many things that have nothing to do with reading or even literacy and one would be hard-pressed to find even a quiet half hour in a library. Even the librarians are loud, often shouting at one another across what they perceive to be an empty room. Our own library offers space for children's Lego events, model train society meetings, crochet clubs and more---all of which would be fine in a designated meeting room with a minimal noise requirement. Instead, many of these events take place in wide open areas with little regard for patrons who may have come there for a quiet reading respite. Bring back the mean librarians!!
    • 4/5
      One of the best books I've read in years. Before I picked it up, I had no interest whatever in the subject matter, but Orlean can make anything riveting. Highly, highly recommended. Rich in detail and thoroughly researched.
    • 5/5
      I am so grateful for this book. I read only a little at a time because I wanted to savor every chapter. This has skyrocketed to one of my top ten, maybe five, favorite books of all time.
    • 4/5
      The Los Angeles Public Library suffered a horrible fire on the same day as the Chernobyl disaster, which is one of the reasons that I had never heard about this event. More than 1,000,000 volumes were damaged or destroyed. The author speculates about the cause of the fire, discusses the history of this library and the ways in which libraries have evolved over the centuries. Interesting and informative.
    • 3/5
      A modern and rambling history of libraries using the skeleton of the history of the Los Angeles library with recurring chapters telling the story of the Los Angeles library fire of 1986.
    • 4/5
      "...to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional."

      If you love libraries this book will make you love them even more - while it revolves mostly around the burning of the L.A. Central Library in 1986 it also provides a rich history of libraries as a whole and how far beyond loaning books they go.
    • 3/5
      Interesting but too much flowery prose.
    • 5/5
      I found this really interesting and even as a librarian I learned a few things. It’s a great book advocating the relevance of libraries and telling a snapshot of their history.
    • 4/5
      This is an excellent book about libraries, primarily the LA Central Library. It is part history, part biography, part mystery. It starts out with the events around the LA Central Library fire in April, 1986, then goes into the history of the library, biographies of the main head librarians and some about the investigation of the fire, mixed in with some auto-biographical information and current and past information about libraries in general. Very interesting, very well written.
    • 5/5
      Great writing and the intertwining of a detective story with the history of the LA library. I am a library nerd and a detective story geek so I was in heaven. This book could stand alone on its history component, detailing the different librarians and the fights to establish a respectable facility in downtown LA. But the description of the fire and resulting damage and repair plus the search for the origin of the blaze adds another dimension to this book. Even included is thoughts and trends on the future of our libraries.

      The writing was a pleasure, clear and expressive and capable taking you into the center of the fire or watching patrons vying for computer time. I enjoyed the way her words sounded to my inner ear, if you know what I mean. So a double treat of a well researched book and very lovely words.
    • 5/5
      Incredible detailed research on LA central library’s history and descriptions of many persons who cared about the library’s purpose
    • 4/5
      This is quite a good read. I think I might have given in 4 1/2 stars instead of 4 under different circumstances, but my attention span is even shorter than usual now. (I read this during the corona virus lockdown of 2020.) This book is centered around the LA Central Library fire of 1986, but it isn't only concerned with the fire and rebuilding of the library. That is mostly a good thing. (I say mostly because I think it wandered a bit further from the subject matter than it needed to.) It's also about the history of this library, and much of it is fascinating. I do recommend this one, but only for people who readily enjoy non-fiction.
    • 3/5
      In 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library was destroyed in a fire which was determined to have been caused by arson. The Library Book has been described as an account of the investigation into the fire and a “love letter” to books and libraries. It was indeed both of these things, but it seemed as if Susan Orlean didn’t have enough material to cover either topic in depth. I most enjoyed reading about the history of the Los Angeles Public Library, its leaders over the years, and the many ways it has served the community. I was interested in learning about Harry Peak, the man accused of starting the fire, but ultimately found these sections repetitive. I became downright annoyed whenever Orlean strayed beyond Los Angeles to discuss libraries around the world, or digressed into musings about how much she personally loves libraries. And jumping from one theme to the next felt disjointed. Don’t get me wrong; this was a pleasant read. It just wasn’t especially compelling.
    • 4/5
      "The Library Book" by Susan Orlean fascinated me and kept me reading hungrily from beginning to end. The "hook" that caught my attention to get me to read this book was that it was the all too real story of the massive fire at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986, an even unknown to many because it occurred simultaneously with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, USSR, but was th library equivalent of a nuclear disaster of its own. 400,000 books were totally destroyed, 700,000 severely damages, full collections of various media and special items were lost forever in a fire that lasted 7 hours and required 300 firefighters.
      The arson squad determined that the fire had been set by human hands and "The Library Book" includes chapters about the prime suspect interwoven with other chapters about the grand and elegant LA Library, its functions and operations, and its place in the history of Los Angeles.
      Beyond that story, however, Orlean weaves in everything you would ever want to know about libraries in general and the LA Library specifically. From its history, to its mode of operation, to mini-biographies of the various librarians it has had and, best of all to me, a beautiful description of its architecture and interior art and design.
      In fact, her story and especially her descriptions of the art and architecture made me make a special trip across the LA basin to go see it. It is a very special building, a temple to knowledge while also being a cozy and inviting escape for readers, students, researchers and just plain folks.
      This is a great book about a great library, and a tribute to the importance, essentialness, really, of public libraries.
      Now, if we could only get politicians to quit reducing their funds and more Americans to actually read!

    Book preview

    The Library Book - Susan Orlean

    For Edith Orlean, my past For Austin Gillespie, my future

    Memory believes before knowing remembers.

    —William Faulkner, Light in August

    And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering.

    —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

    I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

    —Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

    1.

    Stories to Begin On (1940)

    By Bacmeister, Rhoda W.

    X 808 B127

    Begin Now—To Enjoy Tomorrow (1951)

    By Giles, Ray

    362.6 G472

    A Good Place to Begin (1987)

    By Powell, Lawrence Clark

    027.47949 P884

    To Begin at the Beginning (1994)

    By Copenhaver, Martin B.

    230 C782

    Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry Peak attracted attention. He was very blond. Very, very blond, his lawyer said to me, and then he fluttered his hand across his forehead, performing a pantomime of Peak’s heavy swoop of bangs. Another lawyer, who questioned Peak in a deposition, remembered his hair very well. He had a lot of it, she said. And he was very definitely blond. An arson investigator I met described Peak entering a courtroom with all that hair, as if his hair existed independently.

    Having a presence mattered a great deal to Harry Omer Peak. He was born in 1959, and grew up in Santa Fe Springs, a town in the paddle-flat valley less than an hour southeast of Los Angeles, hemmed in by the dun-colored Santa Rosa Hills and a looming sense of monotony. It was a place that offered the soothing uneventfulness of conformity, but Harry longed to stand out. As a kid, he dabbled in the minor delinquencies and pranks that delighted an audience. Girls liked him. He was charming, funny, dimpled, daring. He could talk anyone into anything. He had a gift for drama and invention. He was a storyteller, a yarn-spinner, and an agile liar; he was good at fancying up facts to make his life seem less plain and mingy. According to his sister, he was the biggest bullshitter in the world, so quick to fib and fabricate that even his own family didn’t believe a word he said.

    The closeness of Hollywood’s constant beckoning, combined with his knack for performance, meant, almost predictably, that Harry Peak decided to become an actor. After he finished high school and served a stint in the army, Harry moved to Los Angeles and started dreaming. He began dropping the phrase when I’m a movie star into his conversations. He always said when and not if. For him, it was a statement of fact rather than speculation.

    Although they never actually saw him in any television shows or movies, his family was under the impression that during his time in Hollywood, Harry landed some promising parts. His father told me Harry was on a medical show—maybe General Hospital—and that he had roles in several movies, including The Trial of Billy Jack. IMDb—the world’s largest online database for movies and television—lists a Barry Peak, a Parry Peak, a Harry Peacock, a Barry Pearl, and even a Harry Peak of Plymouth, England, but there is nothing at all listed for a Harry Peak of Los Angeles. As far as I can tell, the only time Harry Peak appeared on screen was on the local news in 1987, after he was arrested for setting the Los Angeles Central Library on fire, destroying almost half a million books and damaging seven hundred thousand more. It was one of the biggest fires in the history of Los Angeles, and it was the single biggest library fire in the history of the United States.

    Central Library, which was designed by the architect Bertram Goodhue and opened in 1926, is in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, at the corner of Fifth Street and Flower, on the downslope of a rise once known as Normal Hill. The hill used to be higher, but when it was chosen as the site of the library, the summit was clawed off to make it more buildable. At the time the library opened, this part of downtown Los Angeles was a busy neighborhood of top-heavy, half-timbered Victorians teetering on the flank of the hills. These days, the houses are gone, and the neighborhood consists of dour, dark office towers standing shoulder to shoulder, casting long shafts of shade across what is left of the hill. Central Library is an entire city block wide, but it is only eight stories high, making it sort of ankle-height compared to these leggy office towers. It projects a horizontality that it probably didn’t in 1926, when it debuted as the high point in what was then a modest, mostly four-story-tall city center.

    The library opens at ten A.M., but by daybreak there are always people hovering nearby. They lean against every side of the building, or perch half on and half off the low stone walls around the perimeter, or array themselves in postures of anticipation in the garden northwest of the main entrance, from which they can maintain a view of the front door. They watch the door with unrewarded vigilance, since there is no chance that the building will open earlier than scheduled. One recent warm morning, the people in the garden were clustered under the canopy of trees, and beside the long, trickling watercourse that seemed to emit a small breath of chilled air. Rolling suitcases and totes and book bags were stashed here and there. Pigeons the color of concrete marched in a bossy staccato around the suitcases. A thin young man in a white dress shirt, a hint of sweat ringing his underarms, wobbled on one foot, gripping a file folder under his arm while trying to fish a cell phone out of his back pocket. Behind him, a woman with a sagging yellow backpack sat on the edge of a bench, leaning forward, eyes closed, hands clasped; I couldn’t tell if she was napping or praying. Near her stood a man wearing a bowler hat and a too-small T-shirt that revealed a half-moon of shiny pink belly. Two women holding clipboards herded a small, swirling group of kids toward the library’s front door. I wandered over to the corner of the garden, where two men sitting by the World Peace Bell were debating a meal they’d apparently shared.

    You have to admit that garlic dressing was good, one of the men was saying.

    I don’t eat salad.

    Oh, come on, man, everyone eats salad!

    Not me. Pause. I love Dr Pepper.

    Between each volley of their conversation, the men cast glances at the main entrance of the library, where a security guard was sitting. One of the doors was open, and the guard sat just inside, visible to anyone passing by. The open door was an irresistible conversation starter. One person after another approached the guard, and he deflected them without even blinking an eye:

    Is the library open yet?

    No, it’s not open.

    Next: Ten A.M.

    Next: You’ll know when it’s time.

    Next: No, not open yet.

    Next: Ten A.M., man—shaking his head and rolling his eyes—ten A.M., like it says on the sign.

    Every few minutes, one of the people approaching the guard flashed an identification badge and was waved in, because the library was actually already in gear, humming with staff members who were readying it for the day. The shipping department had been at work since dawn, packing tens of thousands of books into plastic bins. These were books requested at one of the city’s seventy-three libraries, or that had been returned to one in which they didn’t belong and were being repatriated, or they were brand-new books that had been just cataloged at Central Library and were now on their way to one of the branches. Security guards are at the library around the clock; the guards on duty had started their shift at six A.M. Matthew Mattson, who runs the library’s website, had been at his desk in the basement for an hour, watching the number of website visits surge as the morning advanced.

    In each of the eight subject departments throughout the building, librarians and clerks were tidying shelves, checking new books, and beginning the business of the day. The reading tables and carrels were empty, each chair tucked under each table, all enfolded in a quiet even deeper than the usual velvety quiet of the library. In the History Department, a young librarian named Llyr Heller sorted through a cart of books, weeding out the ones that were damaged or deeply unloved. When she finished, she pulled out a list of books the department wanted to order, checking to make sure they weren’t already in the collection. If they passed that test, she would look at reviews and librarian tip sheets to make sure they warranted buying.

    In the Children’s Department, children’s librarians from around the city were gathered in the puppet theater for their regular meeting. The topic being discussed was how to run an effective story time. The thirty full-size adult humans who were wedged into the tiny seats of the theater listened to the presentation with rapt attention. Use an appropriate-sized teddy bear, the librarian running the session was saying as I walked in. I had been using one I thought was the size of a baby, but I was wrong—it was the size of a very premature baby. She pointed to a bulletin board that was covered with felt. Don’t forget, flannel boards are wonderful, she said. You may want to use them for things like demonstrating penguins getting dressed. You can also hide things inside them, like rabbits and noses.

    Upstairs, Robert Morales, the library’s budget director, and Madeleine Rackley, the business manager, were talking about money with John Szabo, who holds the job of Los Angeles city librarian, in charge of all the libraries in Los Angeles. Just below them, the main clock clicked toward ten, and Selena Terrazas, who is one of Central Library’s three principal librarians, stationed herself at the center axis of the lobby so she could keep watch over the morning rush when the doors officially opened.

    There was a sense of stage business—that churn of activity you can’t hear or see but you feel at a theater in the instant before the curtain rises—of people finding their places and things being set right, before the burst of action begins. The library entrances have been thrown open thousands of times since 1859, the year that a public library first existed in Los Angeles. Yet every time the security guard hollers out that the library has opened, there is a quickening in the air and the feeling that something significant is about to unfold—the play is about to begin. This particular morning, Selena Terrazas checked her watch, and the head of security, David Aguirre, checked his as well, and then Aguirre radioed the guard at the entrance to give the all-clear. After a moment, the guard clambered off his stool and pushed the door open, letting the buttery light of the California morning spill into the entry.

    A puff of outside air wafted in and down the hall. Then, in an instant, people poured in—the hoverers, who bolted from their posts in the garden, and the wall-sitters, and the morning fumblers, and the school groups, and the businesspeople, and the parents with strollers heading to story time, and the students, and the homeless, who rushed straight to the bathrooms and then made a beeline to the computer center, and the scholars, and the time-wasters, and the readers, and the curious, and the bored—all clamoring for The Dictionary of Irish Artists or The Hero with a Thousand Faces or a biography of Lincoln or Pizza Today magazine or The Complete Book of Progressive Knitting or photographs of watermelons in the San Fernando Valley taken in the 1960s or Harry Potter—always, Harry Potter—or any one of the millions of books, pamphlets, maps, musical scores, newspapers, and pictures the library holds in store. They were a rivering flow of humanity, a gush, and they were looking for baby-name guides, and biographies of Charles Parnell, and maps of Indiana, and suggestions from a librarian for a novel that was romantic but not corny; they were picking up tax information and getting tutored in English and checking out movies and tracing their family history. They were sitting in the library, just because it was a pleasant place to sit, and sometimes they were doing things that had nothing to do with the library. On this particular morning, in Social Sciences, a woman at one of the reading tables was sewing beads onto the sleeve of a cotton blouse. In one of the carrels in History, a man in a pin-striped suit who had books on his desk but wasn’t reading held a bag of Doritos under the lip of the table. He pretended to muffle a cough each time he ate a chip.

    I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way. I was raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, just a few blocks from the brick-faced Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. Throughout my childhood, starting when I was very young, I went there several times a week with my mother. On those visits, my mother and I walked in together but as soon as we passed through the door, we split up and each headed to our favorite section. The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy. Even when I was maybe four or five years old, I was allowed to head off on my own. Then, after a while, my mother and I reunited at the checkout counter with our finds. Together we waited as the librarian at the counter pulled out the date card and stamped it with the checkout machine—that giant fist thumping the card with a loud chunk-chunk, printing a crooked due date underneath a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times.

    Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. 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. After we checked out, I loved being in the car and having all the books we’d gotten stacked on my lap, pressing me under their solid, warm weight, their Mylar covers sticking a bit to my thighs. It was such a thrill leaving a place with things you hadn’t paid for; such a thrill anticipating the new books we would read. On the ride home, my mom and I talked about the order in which we were going to read our books and how long until they had to be returned, a solemn conversation in which we decided how to pace ourselves through this charmed, evanescent period of grace until the books were due. We both thought all of the librarians at the Bertram Woods Branch Library were beautiful. For a few minutes we would discuss their beauty. My mother then always mentioned that if she could have chosen any profession at all, she would have chosen to be a librarian, and the car would grow silent for a moment as we both considered what an amazing thing that would have been.

    When I was older, I usually walked to the library myself, lugging back as many books as I could carry. Occasionally, I did go with my mother, and the trip would be as enchanted as it was when I was small. Even when I was in my last year of high school and could drive myself to the library, my mother and I still went together now and then, and the trip unfolded exactly as it did when I was a child, with all the same beats and pauses and comments and reveries, the same perfect pensive rhythm we followed so many times before. When I miss my mother these days, now that she is gone, I like to picture us in the car together, going for one more magnificent trip to Bertram Woods.

    My family was big on the library. We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn’t buy what you could borrow. 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.

    By the time I was born, my parents’ financial circumstances were comfortable, and they learned how to splurge a little, but their Depression-era mentality adhered stubbornly to certain economies, which included not buying books that could be gotten very easily from the library. Our uncrowded bookshelves at home had several sets of encyclopedias (an example of something not convenient to borrow from the library, since you reached for it regularly and urgently) and a random assortment of other books which, for one reason or another, my parents had ended up buying. That included a few mild sex manuals (Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique is the one I remember best, because of course I read it whenever my parents were out of the house). I assume my parents bought the sex books because they would have been embarrassed to present them at the checkout desk of the library. There were also some travel guides, some coffee table books, a few of my father’s law books, and a dozen or so novels that were either gifts or for some reason managed to justify being owned outright.

    When I headed to college, one of the many ways I differentiated myself from my parents was that I went wild for owning books. I think buying textbooks was what got me going. All I know is that I lost my appreciation for the slow pace of making your way through a library and for having books on borrowed time. I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I’d visited. As soon as I got my own apartment, I lined it with bookcases and loaded them with hardcovers. I used the college library for research, but otherwise, 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 fresh alkaline tang of new ink and paper, a smell that never emanated from a broken-in library book. 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. I sometimes wondered if I was catching up after spending my childhood amid sparsely settled bookcases. But the reason didn’t matter to me. I actually became a little evangelical about book ownership. Sometimes I fantasized about starting a bookstore. If my mother ever mentioned to me that she was on the waiting list for some book at the library, I got annoyed and asked why she didn’t just go buy it.

    Once I was done with college, and done with researching term papers in the stacks of the Harold T. and Vivian B. Shapiro Undergraduate Library, I sloughed off the memory of those wondrous childhood trips to the Bertram Woods branch, and began, for the first time in my life, to wonder what libraries were for.

    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. But then libraries came roaring back into my life unexpectedly. In 2011, my husband accepted a job in Los Angeles, so we left New York and headed west. I didn’t know Los Angeles well, but I’d spent time there over the years, visiting cousins who lived in and around the city. When I became a writer, I went to Los Angeles many times to work on magazine pieces and books. On those visits, I had been to and from the beach, and up and down the canyons, and in and out of the valley, and back and forth to the mountains, but I never gave downtown Los Angeles a second thought, assuming it was just a glassy landscape of office buildings that hollowed out by five o’clock every night. I pictured Los Angeles as a radiant doughnut, rimmed by milky ocean and bristling mountains, with a big hole in the middle. I never went to the public library, never thought about the library, although I’m sure I assumed there was a public library, probably a main branch, probably downtown.

    My son was in first grade when we moved to California. One of his first assignments in school was to interview someone who worked for the city. I suggested talking to a garbage collector or a police officer, but he said he wanted to interview a librarian. We were so new to town that we had to look up the address of the closest library, which was the Los Angeles Public Library’s Studio City branch. The branch was about a mile away from our house, which happened to be about the same distance that the Bertram Woods branch was from my childhood home.

    As my son and I drove to meet the librarian, I was flooded by a sense of absolute familiarity, a gut-level recollection of this journey, of parent and child on their way to the library. I had taken this trip so many times before, but now it was turned on its head, and I was the parent bringing my child on that special trip. We parked, and my son and I walked toward the library, taking it in for the first time. The building was white and modish, with a mint green mushroom cap of a roof. From the outside, it didn’t look anything like the stout brick Bertram Woods branch, but when we stepped in, the thunderbolt of recognition struck me so hard that it made me gasp. Decades had passed and I was three thousand miles away, but I felt like I had been lifted up and whisked back to that time and place, back to the scenario of walking into the library with my mother. Nothing had changed—there was the same soft tsk-tsk-tsk of pencil on paper, and the muffled murmuring from patrons at the tables in the center of the room, and the creak and groan of book carts, and the occasional papery clunk of a book dropped on a desk. The scarred wooden checkout counters, and the librarians’ desks, as big as boats, and the bulletin board with its fluttering, raggedy notices were all the same. The sense of gentle, steady busyness, like water on a rolling boil, was just the same. The books on the shelves, with some subtractions and additions, were certainly the same.

    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.

    So the spell libraries once cast on me was renewed. Maybe it had never really been extinguished, although I had been away long enough that it was like visiting a country I’d loved but forgotten as my life went galloping by. I knew what it was like to want a book and to buy it, but I had forgotten what it felt like to amble among the library shelves, finding the book I was looking for but also seeing who its neighbors were, noticing their peculiar concordance, and following an idea as it was handed off from one book to the next, like a game of telephone. I might start at Dewey decimal 301.4129781 (Pioneer Women by Joanna L. Stratton) and a few inches later find myself at 306.7662 (Gaydar by Donald F. Reuter) and then 301.45096 (Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama) and finally 301.55 (The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson). On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.

    Not long after my son interviewed the librarian, I happened to meet a man named Ken Brecher who runs the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the nonprofit organization that champions the city’s libraries and raises money for extra programming and services. Brecher offered to give me a tour of Central Library, so a few days later, I drove downtown to meet him. From the highway, I could see the quiver of dark skyscrapers in the center of the city that surrounded the library. The summer and fall had been rainless. The landscape around me was bright and bleached, blasted, with an almost ashy pallor. Even the palm trees seemed sapped of color, and the reddish rooftops were whitened, as if dusted with sugar.

    I felt new here, and the sheer breadth of Los Angeles still astonished me. It seemed like I could drive and drive and the city would just keep unfurling, almost as if it were a map of Los Angeles being unrolled as I drove over it, rather than a real city that started and stopped somewhere specific. In Los Angeles, your eye keeps reaching for an endpoint and never finds it, because it doesn’t exist. The wide-openness of Los Angeles is a little intoxicating, but it can be unnerving, too—it’s the kind of place that doesn’t hold you close, a place where you can picture yourself cartwheeling off into emptiness, a pocket of zero gravity. I’d spent the previous five years living in the Hudson Valley of New York, so I was more used to bumping into a hill or a river at every turn and settling my gaze on some foreground feature—a tree, a house, a cow. For twenty years before that, I’d lived in Manhattan, where the awareness of when you are in or out of the city is as clear as day.

    I expected Central Library to look like the main libraries I knew best. New York Public Library and the Cleveland Public Library are serious buildings, with grand entrances and a stern, almost religious aura. By contrast, the Los Angeles Central Library looks like what a child might assemble out of blocks. The building—buff-colored, with black inset windows and a number of small entrances—is a fantasia of right angles and nooks and plateaus and terraces and balconies that step up to a single central pyramid surfaced with colored tiles and topped with a bronze sculpture of an open flame held in a human hand. It manages to look ancient and modern at the same time. As I approached, the simple blocky form of the building resolved into a throng of bas-relief stone figures on every wall. There were Virgil and Leonardo and Plato; bison herds and cantering horses; sunbursts and nautiluses; archers and shepherds and printers and scholars; scrolls and wreaths and waves. Philosophical declarations in English and Latin were carved across the building’s face like an ancient ticker tape. Compared to the mute towers around it, the library seemed more a proclamation than a building.

    I circled, reading as I walked. Socrates, cool-eyed and stony-faced, gazed past me. I followed the bustle of visitors to the center of the main floor, and then I continued past the clatter and buzz of the circulation desk and climbed a wide set of stairs that spilled me out into a great rotunda. The rotunda was empty. I stood for a moment, taking it in. The rotunda is one of those rare places that have a kind of sacred atmosphere, full of a quiet so dense and deep that it almost feels underwater. All the rotunda’s features were larger than life, overpowering, jaw-dropping. The walls were covered with huge murals of Native Americans and priests and soldiers and settlers, painted in dusty mauve and blue and gold. The floor was glossy travertine, laid out in a pattern of checkerboard. The ceiling and archways were tiled with squares of red and blue and ocher. In the center of the rotunda hung a massive chandelier—a heavy brass chain dangling a luminous blue glass Earth ringed by the twelve figures of the zodiac.

    I crossed the rotunda and walked toward a large sculpture known as the Statue of Civilization—a marble woman with fine features and perfect posture and a trident in her left hand. I was so stirred by the library’s beauty that when Brecher arrived to give me my tour, I was chattering like someone on a successful first date. Brecher is as thin as a pencil and has bright eyes, pure white hair, and a brisk, barking laugh. He began a running commentary about each fixture, each carving, each plaque on the wall.

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