The Library Book
Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, examines the world of library books in her 2018 nonfiction, The Library Book, published by Thorndike Press. Woven around the story of LA’s Central Library and the major fire of 1986 which destroyed hundreds of thousands of books, magazines, patents and more, this book abounds with fascinating facts about libraries while it is also an exciting page-turner. Orlean tells LA Central Library’s story from its inception and highlights a number of historical characters who left their mark on the Los Angeles library system. She also threads in the story of the tragic young man (Harry Peak) whose personal story becomes entangled with the LA Central Library fire. Orlean’s book also contemplates the future of libraries in the age of information and reflects upon libraries’ roles in reaching the most precarious lives in our communities—the homeless population. And while telling a history, considering a future and seeking to identify the political power of libraries, The Library Book also gives Orlean the ideal platform to commemorate her childhood relationship with libraries and with her mother. There are moments in The Library Book that are piercingly personal and courageously vulnerable. I thoroughly enjoyed The Library Book and encourage any avid reader to put a hold on it today at their local library (or head to their local bookstore to purchase a copy for their home library).
A Few Great Passages:
“My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn’t buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn’t read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs” (24).
“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” (122).
“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delight and loss, and make our mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But 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—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in a persistence of memory” (164-165).
“Even the oddest most peculiar book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another; and to our past and to what is still to come” (521).
“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” (522).
