The Library Book
by Susan Orlean
(London: Atlantic Books, 2018)
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 - play is about to begin.
Page 6.
In an instant, people poured in - the hoverers, who bolted form 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.
Page 6.
In one of the carrels in History, a man in a pin-striped suit who had books on the desk but wasn’t reading held a bad of Doritos under the lip of the table. He pretended to muffle a cough each time he ate a chip.
Page 7.
The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy.
Page 7.
It wasn’t like going to 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.
Page 7.
The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.
Page 9.
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.
Page 9.
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.
Page 11.
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 neighbours were, noticing their peculiar concordance, and following an idea as it was handed off from one book to the next.
Page 12.
On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.
Page 12.
The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.
Page 16.
Things are always coming in and going out of a library, so it’s impossible to know what it contains on any given day.
Page 20.
In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel - in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning. Such a ratio creates an ideal fire situation, which results in total, perfect combustion.
Page 25.
Usually, a fire is read and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass.
Page 25.
In total, f our hundred thousand books in Central library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.
Page 34.
Library fires in the United States are almost always what are known in fire terminology as “incendiary” - namely, a fire caused by human intervention. Most are the result of casual vandalism that gets out of hand.
Page 37.
He hovered between what he didn’t want anymore and what he wasn’t very likely to have.
Page 52.
He was a tumbleweed, lifted and carried wherever the wind took him, alighting briefly in this job and that and then blowing along, leaving little behind as he rolled on.
Page 53.
I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can’t throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try.
Page 55.
The only thing that comes close to this feeling is what I experience when I try to throw out a plant, even if it is the baldest, most aphid-ridden, crooked-stemmed plant in the world. The sensation of dropping a living thing into the trash is what make same queasy. To have that same feeling about a book might seem strange, but this is why I have come to believe that books have souls - why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?
Page 56.
A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum.
Page 56.
Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.
Page 56.
A big fire is loud, clamoring, windy, groaning.
Page 58.
Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux. In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place - it is a transit point, a passage.
Page 59.
The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible.
Page 60.
People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t.
Page 60.
I came to learn that what gets shipped isn’t material going out into the world; it’s books traveling form one branch to another. … it is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.
Page 61.
The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace. The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited.
Page 67.
Abandoned buildings have a quaking, aching emptiness deeper than the emptiness of a building that has never been filled up. This building was full of what it was missing. It was as if the people who passed through had left a small indent in the air: Their absence was present, it lingered.
Page 70.
A large part of a city librarian’s job is to be a property manager.
Pages 71-72.
Libraries have become a de facto community center for the homeless across the globe.
Page 73.
In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries. They become town squares and community centers.
Pages 76-77.
A popular book that gets checked out often begins to fall apart in a year, as many of the books that arrive in the Catalog Department are replacement copies of books the library already owns.
Page 86.
These days, library books that are rare or expensive are sent to private restorers if they need emergency surgery. Ordinary books that start to fall apart are simply thrown out, and new copies are bought in their place.
Page 88.
Hacking into a library’s website seems pointless, since you can access it legitimately anytime.
Page 89.
Sometimes it’s harder to notice a place you think you know well; your eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all.
Page 92.
The idea of being forgotten is terrifying.
Page 93.
If something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose.
Page 93.
Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
Page 93.
Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.
Page 93.
People have been burning libraries for nearly as long as they’ve been building libraries.
Page 95.
The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past.
Page 96.
The most celebrated lost library of the ancient world was Egypt’s Library of Alexandria. Though it figures large in anecdotal history, very little is actually known about the library. There is no record of what the building looked like or even its exact location.
Page 96.
The Library of Alexandria is said to have burned several times.
Page 96.
The last and final burning, which erased it from history forever, occurred in AD 640. By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing - an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the exiting knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.
Page 96.
In the saga of humankind, most things are done for money - arson especially - but there is no money to be made by burning libraries. Instead, libraries re usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic.
Page 97.
You could fill a book with the list of lost libraries of the world, and in fact, there have been many books written about them.
Page 97.
War is the greatest slayer of libraries.
Page 97.
World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis lone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.
Page 98.
The spectacle of destroying books was particularly excruciating for Jews, who have long been known as “people of the book.” Judaism considers books sacred, and its most sacred text, the Torah, is doted upon, dressed in a cloth mantle, and decorated with jewels, a silver breastplate, and a crown.
Page 99.
Jews believe books are more than just printed documents; they believe books have a kind of humanity and a soul.
Page 99.
Burning books is an inefficient way to conduct s ear, since books and libraries have no military value, but it is a devastating act. Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe. The deepest effect of burning books is emotional. When libraries burn, the books are sometimes described as being “wounded” or as “casualties,” just as human beings would be.
Page 102.
Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. … Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.
Page 103.
For a long time, it was believed that the leading cause of library fires was careless smoking. Then libraries banned smoking. The number of fires should have declined, but in fact, they increased. Investigators now believe that the majority of library fires are deliberately set.
Page 106.
The general public didn’t really agree on the value of public libraries until the end of the nineteenth century. Before that, libraries were viewed as scholarly and elite, rather than an indispensable and democratic public resource. Many public libraries still had membership fees. The change of attitude began with the philanthropy of Scottish businessman Andrew Carnegie, who launched a library-building project in 1890.
Page 130.
The earliest figures in the American library movement were men, most of them from wealthy New England families, who took on librarianship as a form of missionary work, conveying wisdom to the ignorant masses.
Page 132.
What really brought women into the field was the monumental growth of libraries at the end of the 1800s, primed by Carnegie’s example.
Page 132.
At the time, one of the few job paths open to women was teaching, and librarianship was a natural lateral move. Because the need for librarians was so great, the usual male resistance to opening ranks was overridden by the urgency for more staff.
Page 132.
Of all major criminal offenses, arson is the least successfully prosecuted.
Page 167.
What made the library fire especially hard to investigate was that it occurred in a public space. Unless you borrow s book, your time n a library is unrecorded and anonymous.
Page 167.
A craze for self-improvement and reinvention thrived in this fresh new place conjured out of the scrubby desert. The library was part of that craze, since it offered the tools for fashioning a new self.
Page 175.
By this time, the library - and libraries around the country - had become an essential feature of the American landscape, a civic junction, a station in ordinary life. Everyone traveled through the library. In such a place, this crossroads, you might even find someone you had lost. People searching for missing loved ones sometimes scribbled messages in library books with the hope that the person they were looking for would see the message - as if the library had become a public broadcast system.
Page 176.
The conversation classes do have specific lesson plans, but they also function as an opportunity to practice talking in a setting where it doesn’t matter if you have a faltering grasp of English or a heavy accent.
Page 186.
Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library.
Page 195.
After the stock market crash, book circulation rose by sixty percent, and the number of patrons almost doubled.
Page 195.
People wanted so much from the library. They wanted it to solve things for them. They wanted the library to fix them and teach them how to fix their lives.
Page 196.
The concept that the years between twelve and nineteen form a distinct phase of life barely existed until the 1960s.
Page 204.
Being a teen librarian is a slight misnomer. The librarians in the department view themselves as a hybrid of unofficial advice-givers, part-time disciplinarians, and homework coaches. They act in loco parentis for many kids who get scant parenting at home.
Page 206.
Libraries saw the Internet coming and extended a hand. First, they set up computer station for public use; then they offered free Wi-Fi. Now at Central |Library and many other libraries around the country, there are kiosks where anyone can borrow a laptop or tablet computer to use for the day, just the way she might borrow a book.
Page 240.
“Here’s the thing about library security … Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that’s something to keep in mind.”
Page 243.
Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad. Often, at the library, society’s problems are magnified.
Page 244.
The communal nature of a library is the very essence of the library, in the shared desks and shared books and shared restrooms.
Page 244.
There are a lot of surprising things in the library; a lot of things you don’t think of when you try to imagine all of what a library might contain.
Page 265.
There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is.
Page 266.
Los Angeles has more working musicians than any city in the United States. It also has one of the few libraries in the country that loans out musical scores. The coexistence of these facts doesn’t seem like an accident.
Page 268.
A long-standing belief among arson people is that fires burn hottest where they originate.
Page 274.
Point of origin is the key to any fire investigation.
Page 276.
In the majority of arson convictions that have been overturned, the point of origin was incorrectly identified.
Page 277.
Whenever the weather is bad, people who live on the streets gravitate to the comfort of the reading rooms.
Page 284.
Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald’s; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one. In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books.
Page 289.
Unlike older generations, people under thirty are also less likely to have office jobs. Consequently, they are always looking for pleasant places to work outside their homes. Many end up in coffee shops and hotel lobbies or join the booming business of coworking spaces. Some of them are also discovering that libraries are society’s original coworking spaces and have the distinct advantage of being free.
Page 289.
Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information.
Page 299.
A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.
Page 309.
All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.
Page 310.