In a world of AI-driven reels, miraculous spectacles need rethinking. Once asked about the most remarkable things I’d ever seen, I am pretty sure I would have begun with scale: a redwood tree in Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve; Victor Wembanyama jogging on a treadmill next to me in a Sacramento hotel gym (true story); the Sahara as seen from above from a plane.
As I’ve aged, the large still looms, but the images that linger in my mind are often about togetherness: my brothers and father standing around my mother’s bed at the moment of her death from Parkinson’s; a pack of stray dogs taking in the sunset at the ruins of Baalbek; and this one in particular, several hundred Norwegians forming a human chain to carry books across town from a library in Oslo that was about to close to one about to open.
In my memory, I seem to remember them singing. That soundtrack is very likely piped in after the fact. Were there torches and poems? I don’t know. What is true is that everyone there had volunteered their time to help transport books on a weekend night when they could have been out doing other things. Books were special enough to need what is described in the shipping industry as white-glove service—door-to-door delivery by hand.
A similar human chain is activated in Susan Orlean’s enormously engaging The Library Book, an account of the 1986 fire that nearly burned down Los Angeles’s august Central Library on Fifth and Flower, destroying 400,000 books and damaging another 700,000 over the course of an eight-hour blaze. What began as a whisper of smoke so small that the first fire companies on site couldn’t even find it turned into an inferno with temperatures reaching more than 2,000 degrees. The stacks of the library acted like chimney flues, Orlean writes, whisking in oxygen as the fire gobbled up precious collections as fuel, including one of the largest American assemblages of patent applications; thousands of cookbooks; scores of magazines; works about science and ornithology; and everything in the fiction section between the letters A and L of the alphabet. The fire burned so hot at a certain point that it became translucent, like glass, and appeared cold from the outside.
As an account of an inferno, The Library Book is first-rate reporting, full of eye-popping details on how a fire burns—and how it is investigated. The book belongs right up there with Norman Maclean’s great work on the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana, Young Men and Fire, with its glimpses of the smoke jumpers who battled such blazes, and Stewart O’Nan’s terrifying The Circus Fire, about the disastrous Hartford blaze of 1944, in which a Ringling Bros. paraffin-treated big top went up in flames and claimed nearly 170 lives. In a world in which fire wreaks such destruction, we need these books. But the book Orlean’s tale becomes is needed too. What begins here as the story of a crime evolves into a chronicle of an institution, how a space can be alive, shared, treasured, threatened, and resurrected through group action. In this way, it is a story that reminds us of the spirit of great libraries: that humanity is a collective enterprise.
And so back to the human chain. The day after the fire, Orlean writes, the ash still smoldering, the culprit still un-fingered (more on him later), a clock began ticking because a great many books had been soaked by three million gallons of water that had been poured onto the flames from the 60 fire companies that worked to put out the blaze. A wet book begins to develop mold within 48 hours, Orlean informs us, and so a plan was devised to somehow get as many drenched tomes out of the library and into a deep freezer the day after. Orlean reports that a call went out the night of the fire, and the following day, some 2,000 volunteers showed up and passed books hand to hand out of the library and into trucks and on their way to two undisclosed commercial freezers, next to shrimp and other former creatures of the sea. Officials worried that if the plan was released, the arsonist might strike again.
This gesture, of many hands working together, appears and reappears throughout The Library Book, like a melody against the darkness of spirit the event prompts: Who would want to burn a library? As Orlean splits her narrative into several strands—including her own reasons for writing the book (more on that in a bit too), the story of the fire and its aftermath, and the tale of how the library originally came into being—she also begins to tell us a simple story about how a library works. Anyone who grew up having been sent to the library for information will relate. How many of us went there first to figure out how things work? Funny cars, atomic reactors, photosynthesis, democracy, dinosaurs, space travel, love. Explanations for how all of it functioned lived at the library on its shelves. Recalling her childhood in Shaker Heights, in Cleveland, Orlean describes her earliest childhood trips with her mother to the library, and it is in honor of those memories that she set out to write this story.
It would appear the experience was formative for her. As a journalist, Orlean became the kind of person a magazine dispatches to figure out—well—how things work. Saturday night, taxidermy, surfing, treadmill desks. Following Orlean in the early days of her reporting here in The Library Book is accidentally comical, as she lurks about the library suddenly seeing how strange and fabulous it is that such a place exists at all. “The more time I spent at Central, the more I realized that a library is an intricate machine,” she writes, “a contraption of whirring gears. There were days when I came to the library and planted myself near the center of the main corridor and simply watched the whirl and throb of the place.” It’s hard not to hear an echo of the abolitionist and Gilded Age reformer James Russell Lowell’s critical description of the Constitution as “a machine that would run of itself,” needing no maintenance.
Just as quickly, however, The Library Book rejects this invisible hand of the market approach to great institutions and does something even more deeply Orleanesque. It follows the people. After all, the Los Angeles library was run by and survived because of people, and Orlean treats this part of its narrative as a series of portraits. Ranging from the children’s librarians to retired art librarians to the head of security to people who work in shipping, her book is a roving biography of people who dedicate themselves to sharing knowledge and believe in the power of the book.
As a writer of books, Orlean had made her name by following extreme personalities, like John Laroche, the self-taught horticulturalist at the heart of The Orchid Thief, or Cristina Sánchez, the female bullfighter she interviewed for The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. In fact, Orlean has been the kind of person entirely capable of making an insane person’s passion seem sensible. The Library Book doesn’t suffer under this burden of eccentricity, totally. The character at the center of this book is not Harry Peak, the aspiring actor who would brag to friends that he’d started the fire yet gave police a blizzard of shifting stories, but the city employees just trying to keep the building open.
Most of the people in The Library Book simply care about books, but not necessarily about reading. After she begins interviewing people, Orlean stumbles upon the fun fact that some 32,000 books are crossing Los Angeles every week (back in 2017) thanks to the interlibrary loan function, which makes it possible for someone in Hollywood to check out a book that normally lives in the Platt branch in Woodland Hills. “It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books,” she writes. One morning, Orlean spends time with Barbara, who, as they talk, is packing books into cartons sight unseen. She has spent her life doing this and other work for the library. Not reading however. “You read and read and read and read,” Barbara says to her, “and then what?”
The Library Book in this way is a study about all the people it takes to make an idea a possibility—and all the books it takes to make other possibilities seem sensible. One of the largest populations within Los Angeles who use the library are the unhoused, and The Library Book reveals how much the institution thinks about their needs (at a time when the population is treated like a problem), even piloting a program that directly delivers to the library services that the unhoused need, since so many of them will be there.
Perhaps it says a lot about our cruel times, but even the head of security, David Aguirre, emerges from this book as a person who respects the dignity of all patrons. One of his jobs is to decide when someone is disruptive enough to be asked to leave. While Orlean is following him around, he comes across a woman eating and pauses to explain to the patron, “You can’t be eating in here, ma’am,” he says. “Oh, I’m not eating,” the woman replies: “I’m snacking.” “There’s no snacking,” he corrects.
The Library Book is a tale made up of such moments. It is a relief that it does not become a yarn of a man determined to destroy the library. Peak was not a hater of other people, as Orlean discovers, simply a fabulist who sought attention. Following the case and its absurd twists and turns, and then his death in 1993, you wind up concluding that the world is hard for some people and everyday life is not enough for some of them, perhaps Peak among them. If he indeed did commit the crime, which seems very unlikely, his motives are so buried as to be unknowable.
Keeping this quiet, tender regard lit for all people is one of the finest qualities of The Library Book. It appears to have begun at home. Orlean describes beginning the book in honor of her mother and then losing that connection as dementia chipped away at her mother’s mind. There is a poignant seesaw in the book, between the way libraries and knowledge can be accessible to all who can read and use computers and the manner in which our inner lives remain a mystery. Do we need to know all about some people?
In this world, at this moment, this feels like a crucial value The Library Book is arguing for. It’s not that crimes against the book or against libraries are unfathomable or have stopped. Whenever a civilization took action against any aspect of itself, or a civilization next to it, libraries came under threat, from ancient China to Nazi Germany, when tens of thousands of books were burned; from Sarajevo in the 1990s to Gaza today, where in the past three years more than 87 libraries have been partially or totally destroyed by the Israeli army in its assault. And the destruction now continues at such a rate in Lebanon that a group of librarians, scholars, and publishers has assembled more than 80 volunteers to protect crucial manuscripts, documents, and collections from destruction.
The Library Book doesn’t raise the question, Are we the species who burn the book and destroy it, or are we the species who rescue it? Obviously, sadly, we are both. With her talent for portraiture, Orleans shines a light on the type of people who dedicate themselves to rescuing books. They are her latest subculture, perhaps her biggest. Those who believe that when books get together, better things are possible. OK, not snacking but reading, sharing time, wonder, and important parts of memory. For this, they are worth risking life and limb for, be it in Lebanon or Los Angeles or anywhere in between.•
Join us on August 13 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Orlean will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Dorothy Lazard to discuss The Library Book. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
THE LIBRARY BOOK, BY SUSAN ORLEAN
