Starting off the hour, host John Freeman introduced Susan Orlean’s book, which is partly about the massive 1986 fire at the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, by saying, “The Library Book is a tribute to what libraries can do, to how they are part of the collective consciousness of places…. They basically make memory possible.” He asked Orlean what the challenge was in reporting the decades-old fire.
Orlean responded that there were still enough people around who could talk to her about the incident itself—both firefighters and librarians. The bigger challenge from her perspective was that she was asking people to get excited about something that had happened long ago and trying to reanimate that story. She went on the “assumption that anything that you examine with passion becomes reanimated by that passion.”
Freeman noted that the story of the library becoming itself eclipses the story of the fire, asking, “Why did it draw such characters to it from the very beginning?”
Orlean said, “I think from the beginning of its days, Los Angeles has been what happens when you take the map of the U.S. and you tilt it, and the kookiest, most eccentric, most interesting people roll to the southwest corner, and they end up in L.A.” She continued, “It’s the California gossamer. It’s the magic of the edge of the country, of a place where there’s gold in the hills, where people came to reinvent themselves.… I think when you’re looking at a population that’s already oversupplied with eccentric people, they end up in libraries, and that’s been true for L.A. from the very beginning.”
Former librarian, historian, and author Dorothy Lazard joined the conversation and thanked Orlean for writing such a beautiful tribute to libraries, as well as librarians. Orlean said that the joy the writing had given back to her was extraordinary. Lazard said, “I can’t imagine anybody coming out of reading this book without a profound appreciation for all of the variety of ways that a book gets on a library shelf.”
Orlean responded, “Well, it was fascinating to me. I mean, I love two kinds of stories. One is, I love finding subcultures or corners of society that I didn’t know existed, and that’s really fun. But I also love looking at something that I think I know and stopping and realizing that I actually really don’t know anything about it. So that was 100 percent the case with libraries. I thought, Libraries, what’s there to learn? And then I started thinking, Well, actually, I don’t have a clue about how books get into libraries.”
Lazard commented that she was caught up in the vast amount of materials lost in the fire and asked, “Was there any particular thing or set of things that you discovered were lost that really just set you back on your heels?” Orlean explained that there were 400,000 books totally destroyed in the fire and 700,000 damaged. Of the 400,000 books, a lot of them weren’t rare books or things that an antiquarian bookdealer would sell. “It’s about the everyday books that are now gone forever,” Orlean said. “For instance, the L.A. library had a really big cooking section, and they had all of these cookbooks from the beginning of the library’s existence, you know, the late 1800s, early 1900s. Those you don’t get back. They’re a kind of cultural artifact. A cookbook from 1901. What does it tell us about how people lived then? So I’m less concerned about those books that have a big monetary value, and I’m more heartsick appreciating the everyday texture of our lives, which libraries are so good at capturing so much of, that was lost.”
Lazard pointed out that in the book, Orlean talks about her mother’s memory loss and how her mother had inspired her to write the book. “How did that impact your writing, if it did at all, your mother’s memory loss?” Lazard asked.
Orlean answered, “This is really a book about memory and libraries. Books are our most durable, most enduring object of memory. [A book is] a delivery device for a story that I made up that I want to share with you, or information I’ve gathered that I want someone else to know and remember. That’s what books are. Libraries become this storehouse of all of these acts of memory.… As I watched my mom losing her memory, it was, in an eerie way, the experience of books burning in a fire and that feeling that I don’t even know what I’m losing.” A guiding theme for Orlean in writing the book was the Senegalese expression that “when someone dies, their library has burned.”•
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THE LIBRARY BOOK, BY SUSAN ORLEAN
