Book of the Year - 2018

Los Angeles Public Library

The Goodhue Building

1935

It wasn't difficult to make my choice for Book of the Year: The Library Book by Susan Orlean. It is one that recently came into my life and comes with a pretty good story as to how I happened to acquire it. I wrote about the surprising circumstances of receiving the book here.

Now that I have read it, I have been recommending The Library Book to just about everyone I talk with. It is part mystery, part history, part biography, and always a tribute to libraries and books. It offers brief lessons in architecture, city planning, social issues, firefighting, arson investigations, and technology.

The idea for the book came about when Ms. Orlean learned of the fire in 1986 that practically destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library. Was the fire caused by accident or was it caused by "an open flame, held by a human hand"?

No matter how it began, before it ended, the fire had raged for seven hours killing 400,000 books and injuring 700,000 more. It was seven years before the doors of the rescued and renovated Goodhue Building opened again to patrons.

Ms. Orlean cannot write a stodgy sentence. Her description of the path of the fire as it roamed through the stacks consuming book after book and shelf after shelf left me with tears in my eyes. Her attempts to experience what it felt like to burn a book (fittingly, a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) was as traumatizing for me as it was for her. 

Here are fascinating facts about how libraries work, their history, and thoughts on their future. Ms. Orlean offers the personality-filled lineage of the heads of the Los Angeles Public Library (founded in 1872). She relates her many conversations with current staff members, department heads, and even the security guards who make their daily rounds.  

She writes of mobile libraries around the world including ones powered by donkey, burro, boat, train, or elephant. There is also a nod to the 1936 establishment of the Works Progress Administration's Pack Horse Librarians who for years served the small communities in the mountains of Kentucky, my home state.

She recalls with great fondness trips she made as a child with her mother to her local library. She explores the future of libraries as not just storehouses of material - not only books, but maps, music, art, genealogical sources, and films - but as information and knowledge centers. Town squares, if you will, where people meet and mingle, read and relax.

There are so many thoughtful features in the construction of The Library Book - from its cover that feels like cloth to the card catalog titles that open each chapter to the end papers - but, I won't spoil that surprise.

If you haven't yet bought yourself a Christmas present, I guarantee you won't go wrong treating yourself to The Library Book. This is definitely one you will want for your own library.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

I am here to offer you firsthand proof that the library is filled with magical happenings.

On Monday night I attended an author event at the Louisville Free Public Library. I was there to hear Susan Orlean talk about her latest non-fiction offering, The Library Book. She gave a splendid presentation, reading a few selections from the book, answering questions from the audience, and generally just charming us all with her relaxed conversation and humor.

The Library Book begins with the fire of the Los Angeles Library in 1986. A fire intentionally set that destroyed 400,000 books and damaged another 700,000. (I know. I shudder to think of the loss.) It is the largest library fire in U.S. history. The downtown building, erected in the 1926, was closed for seven years while renovation and reconstruction took place. 

This event prompted Ms. Orlean, many years later, to write this book. She is a big fan of libraries and in the book recalls her many trips as a child with her mother to their local library in Akron, Ohio. She loved that she was given free rein to roam the library, and as she said, "leave with books I hadn't paid for."

She also writes about the history of libraries in general and the day-to-day life of the institutions.

During the Q&A she spoke of her need for a private work space and of her writing process. She sorts her handwritten research notes onto 5"x 8" index cards (for this book she had 700 of them), and once she begins, aims to write 1000 words a day, revising and editing as she goes along.

After her talk, I made my way to the lobby to purchase this book and have her autograph it. I definitely felt a connection. After all, my mother was head librarian of a large branch library here in Louisville for many years; I had visited the Los Angeles Public Library (not many years before the fire) and remember the murals in its rotunda depicting the history of California; and my first job was as a page at our small neighborhood library earning 50 cents an hour. 

I had to have this book.

I stood in line, money in hand and ready to buy. But, when I got to the head of the line I was told that all the books were gone. 

Oh, dear.

I turned and looked at the folks standing in the autograph line and saw a gentleman holding a stack of seven or eight books in his arms. In my most charming manner, I approached him and said with a smile, "They are out of books. Would you consider arm wrestling me for one of yours?"

Well, dear Reader, the man did not even hesitate, but immediately handed me a book and said, "Merry Christmas!"

I was stunned. I protested that I would willingly pay him for it, but he declined asking me to make a donation to The Library Foundation instead.  I gladly made a gift in memory of my mother. 

I was last in line to have Ms. Orlean sign my newly acquired copy. We chatted a bit about libraries, my mother, books, and the generosity of the man in line.

So there you have it. Magical happenings in the library. Not only do I have The Library Book full of stories about libraries, but I also have my own story of how I came to own The Library Book. 

Author Susan Orlean

The Library Book

(My apologies for the terrible photo. 

The lighting in the auditorium was awful 

and my camera never fails to blur at inopportune moments.)

The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom

The Case of the Missing Books is not so much a mystery as a comic novel. To be sure, there is the mystery: who stole the 15,000 books from the Tumdrum Library? And there is grievous bodily harm but only to our hapless hero's wardrobe and dignity.

After traveling by train, ferry, and bus from London, when Israel Armstrong finally arrives in Tumdrum, a coastal town in Northern Ireland, to begin what he thinks is his new career as town librarian, he discovers that the library has closed - permanently. His job, it seems, now entails operating the town's beat-up, rusty - and bookless - mobile library.

Israel is not happy about this. In his mind a mobile library lives at the bottom of a long list of libraries that is topped by the British Library, university libraries, big public libraries, and even falls below libraries in prisons and mental institutions. Of course, a mobile library is not a library if it contains no books and he sets out to find who stole them which leads to many merry adventures. Merry for the reader, that is, but not for Israel who is definitely a stranger in a strange land.

To wit: His living quarters on a family's farm turn out to be an abandoned chicken coop complete with a few straggly hens; he is forced to wear borrowed and too-short camo pants and jacket as his one corduroy suit burned while drying out on the farmhouse stove (along with his credit cards and cash); and just about everyone he meets is suspicious of him and a wee bit combative.

Poor Israel. He just doesn't seem to ever get a break. But all's well that ends well, and he does manage to solve the case.

This book is the first in the Mobile Library Mystery series by Ian Sansom that I referenced in last week's post (here). I loved the characters and the bizarre situations that Israel, the hopeful librarian, finds himself in. (Although he doesn't enjoy them as much as the reader!)

And the cover, a throwback to pre-computer days, is a gem.

There are many literary references that, of course, are always fun, and Mr. Sansom's writing is clever and entertaining. I have to say that I enjoyed this romp a little better than his Norfolk Mystery, but will give the second installments of both series a try.

These books have offered me a literary vacation which has been quite pleasant. What places have you visited via books this summer?

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

I am a big fan of libraries. I have had a library card allowing me free access to its treasures from every library in each city I have lived. I visit libraries when I travel. My mother was in charge for many years of one of the busiest branches in our city library system. My first job was as a page in one of the smaller neighborhood branches when I was in high school. I shelved books and was paid a whopping fifty cents an hour.

A few years ago, I even asked the head of the city library if I could spend the night in the Main Library. I wanted to write a feature story about what that would be like. He just looked at me, mumbled something about security, and shook his head. 

Oh, well. I tried.

Which leads me to The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel. From the title one may think this is a horror story in which evil lurks in the stacks. But it is not. Instead, Mr. Manguel looks at libraries - public and private, ancient and modern - from many different perspectives. So we have chapters - fifteen in all - with titles of, for example, The Library as Shape; as Imagination; as Order; as Workshop; as Mind.

He begins with a description of his own library built on the spot of the barn of his 15th century house in France and lets the reader know that his favorite time to be there is at night. 

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.

But we soon leave the author's library and go on a magic carpet ride through history, literature, architecture, lost books, lost libraries, censorship and the burning of books (which is where the real evil lurks), and other people and their libraries. 

In one of my favorite chapters - The Library as Workshop - Manguel evokes the room known as 'the study', a classification one doesn't hear about any more except in reading Golden Age British mysteries. The study, he writes, is the area within the library where writers do their work. So we get a glimpse of the studies of Erasmus, Borges, Kipling, Victor Hugo, and Cervantes.

As for the author's study, Manguel writes:

There's a notable difference, for me, between the large room in which I keep most of my books, and the smaller room in which I work. In the large room, the "library proper," I choose the volumes I need or want, I sit and read and make notes, I consult my encyclopedias. But in my study, the chosen books are those that I consider more immediate, more necessary, more intimate.

He goes on to list as his chosen books both the pocket edition and the two-volume shorter edition of the Oxford dictionary, the 1962 version of Roget's Thesaurus, Graves's Greek Myths, and a few others, which he writes, "feel like extensions of myself, at arm's length, always helpful."

The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polygamous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil's famous words, under "the friendly silence of the soundless moon."

I have faithful reader, Tullik, to thank for recommending The Library at Night to me. It is one of those books that is a liberal arts education in itself offering interesting tidbits on a variety of subjects. And it has photos which add to its appeal.

I must admit that as I was reading this book, I was overcome with the desire to install bookshelves on every wall in my house. To turn my entire home into a library...a library for day and for night. What sweet dreams.

Thank you, Mr. Carnegie

Carnegie's first library in Dunfermline, Scotland

Many American cities, including my own, have Andrew Carnegie to thank for his generosity in donating money for the building of lending libraries. In 1899, my city received $450,000 from Carnegie and built not only our main library building but eight branches. One of those branches is right down the road from me and still operates as a library. Two others that I know of are still operating. A couple of others have closed or moved into other facilities. One Carnegie building in a nearby neighborhood has become an office building and another is a community center.

I write about this as I am doing my research on libraries to visit on my Southern Tour. Nashville's original Carnegie library was torn down. The new main library was opened in 2001 and was designed by Robert A.M. Stern.

It doesn't appear as though Carnegie's money made it to Memphis. Although its library system was founded in 1888, I find no mention of a Carnegie grant. Its 330,000-square-foot Central Library opened to the public on November 10, 2001.

I guess I won't be seeing the ghost of Mr. Carnegie in the stacks after all.

Library Love

My favorite place to be is a library. Any library. I have visited reading rooms in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the British Library in London, and the Burton Barr Central Library, a soaring contemporary building in Phoenix, Arizona. There is the library in Los Angeles, one in Sedona, another in Lompoc, California. When I travel, I try to find the city's library and drop in for a visit.

I head for the main library in my own city at least once a week.

My library opened in 1908. Although today it has 17 branches, I stick with the Main building with its marble floors and columns. It has so many of the older books that I want to read. Nothing is better than rambling through the shelves and delighting in discovering a new...er, old...author.

I gravitate toward books of essays, especially the ones that feature their Dewey Decimal classification numbers handwritten in ink on the spines. Heaven. I have found thoughts and been informed by A.A. Milne, Nancy Mitford, and David Grayson.

I do so miss the little blue or white due date cards, though. They came in so handy as bookmarks. And the pockets that held those cards are gone as well. Now, I get a computer-generated grocery list of the book titles and their due dates.

Sigh.