The public library feels like the vestigial tail of a society we no longer pretend to have. A free public space where anyone can access knowledge in various forms, where librarians, with firm boundaries but without judgment, are there to support, not obstruct, people’s weird dreams and niche interests. When I think about people standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a baseball hat over their heart, a lone jingoistic tear rolling down their cheek—this is how I feel about libraries, this same level of intense, unbridled, patriotic sentimentality. What would the country look like if it was run by librarians, public servants to knowledge? Like the postal workers: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these librarians from the swift completion of their appointed rounds…
As a child, I would go to a public library in Brookline, Massachusetts. Out front was a huge weeping willow and a Civil War monument, an oxidized sculpture of a Union soldier on a horse, blowing into a bugle. Monuments seem quite strange nowadays, don’t they? Who wants to remember loss or history? Not corporations! Memorializing a collective pain implies that we are a collective and not just individual consumers. I’d go to this library with my dad—he would get VHS tapes to copy for his personal collection—and I would stock up on books that my mother deemed too pulpy. Candy-colored tomes with embossed covers credited to one author but usually churned out by teams of people. When I looked them up to show my daughter, I found that many were out of print, and when I tracked down old copies to give her, she read them unenthusiastically. They left her puzzled and concerned for me—her first contact with the larger misogynistic world. Why were all the female characters in these thrillers so flat, lacking agency and interiority? Good question, kid!
My daughter loves the library too. It’s the first place that we allowed her to visit independently. She would walk there from the elementary school with her friends and then call me once she got there from the library’s phone, something that the librarians permitted but did not encourage. (Saints! All of them! Cookies and treats every Christmas!) She and her friends would play on the computers, ceding them occasionally to members of the community. They would read manga and hang out in the Teen Korner, even though they were not teens. Somehow my daughter started tutoring kids in the tutoring area. I’m not sure how this started, under what misunderstanding. On the library printer, my daughter made flyers for her various businesses. Anything goes at the library!
There were some unsavory characters. A street preacher whose car stenciled with biblical verses was always parked out front. He would get into loud arguments with his wife. One time, my daughter told me, she saw a guy on the computer next to her googling how to make a gun or dispose of a body or something else a person would want to do in a way that would be hard to trace back to them. As a city child myself, I’d found eavesdropping in public spaces to be my most titillating and sometimes unsettling hobby. I’m glad that she gets to have that at the library. The overheard conversations, like the books themselves, offer a window into other worlds.
I grew up in a home where books were treated like sacred objects. In the Soviet Union, where I was born, people would smuggle banned books from across the border and retype them—samizdat, the practice and the resulting books were called. If they were found during a search, you could, at various points in history, do hard time. When my grandmother found a copy of a samizdat among my father’s things, she became convinced that he was a spy for the West. Later, in a seemingly different lifetime, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and she’d moved to the United States, she would take me to the library where she would go to learn English. She was a member of all the book clubs and frequently complained about how the books they picked were too racy.
My mom said that you had to read fast in the Soviet Union because there was always a line of people waiting for the samizdat. Sometimes my mother told me, the books would come on a roll of film and would be projected onto the wall for several people to read at once, but this was risky—you had to trust whoever was reading it with you not to rat you out. I guess books were banned in the United States, too, still are in many libraries. Obviously, I am against censorship, but the fact that it exists almost gives me hope, because implicit in the fear that motivates it is that literature has power. This seems quaint: having free speech and access to the internet and thinking that words could make a difference. It feels more hopeless to be deluged with all knowledge and anti-knowledge and none of it mattering.
In June, I went on a tour of the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. My daughter was in the Octavia Lab printing large-format movie posters she had designed—very belated Christmas presents—for Ten Things I Hate About Stew (in which Julia Stiles lies pigeon-toed, scowling at a pot of stew) and Polar Depressed (a melting snowman for her cousin who used to make us watch The Polar Express multiple times every Christmas). Around my daughter, concert promoters from San Diego were cutting down posters for a big dance party, a lady was editing a movie, and pieces of some sort of fantasy game were being 3D-printed layer by layer.
My husband once told me that he’d heard on some productivity podcast that it’s good to be in a big room to have big thoughts, that the spaciousness translates to your ideas. The central branch has many large rooms. Before I went on the tour, I was not doing so hot. I was stuck in my head, ruminating about the state of the world, but wandering through the grand rooms, past old murals and marble sculptures, listening to the tour guide talk about the architecture and the history, I found myself near tears. I felt really moved. This space, it occurred to me, it was for me; it was for everyone. This space is ours.•
Join us on August 13 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Susan Orlean will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Dorothy Lazard to discuss The Library Book. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
MAGGIE’S FARM
Read Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin’s review of Claire Boyles’s Appraisals. —Alta
AUGUST RELEASES
Here are new books of and about the West we’re excited to see published this month. —Alta
26 ANSWERS
Susan Orlean responds to the SJP Lit Questionnaire, which asks such questions as who her favorite fictional couple is and what book broke her heart. —Substack
BLOCKBUSTER
Orlean says translator Emily Wilson, who harshly criticized Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey in the London Review of Books, is being a “bit of a jerk.” —Los Angeles Times
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