The Library Book by Susan Orlean

When I first heard about The Library Book by Susan Orlean, I thought it was about a library book. I love books and I love the library, so sure, that sounds like a book I'd like. Then I learned a bit more about it and that it was actually about the 1986 fire that burned down the Los Angeles Public Library. Okay, sounds interesting. Here are a few facts that I picked up about that incident:

• By the time it was extinguished, [the fire] had consumed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more.
• The building burned for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2,000 degrees; it was so fierce that almost every firefighter in Los Angeles was called to the scene.
• The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen branch libraries.
• The cost to replace the four hundred thousand lost books was estimated at over $14 million.
• The author had never heard of the fire (she lived in New York at the time) and it was because it occurred three days following the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union: The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.
• According to librarian Glen Creason, the breeze was filled with "the smell of heartbreak and ashes.'

Invaluable items were lost in the fire:

• ...car repair manuals for every single make and model of automobile starting with the Model T 
• A volume of Don Quixote from 1860
• A leaf from a 1635 Coverdale Bible, which was the first complete translation in modern English.
  

The book goes on to discuss who, if anyone, was responsible. There was a suspect, but he was never convicted or even tried in criminal court.

Then as I continued to read, I realized this book wasn't just about single library fire, but about the history of the Los Angeles Public Library, its librarians, and even the general history of the growth of Los Angeles itself. I was surprised to read the history (and even scandal!) of the head librarians at the library since its beginning: it was like reading a soap opera! There were many wonderful things established by these librarians including by the current head City Librarian John Szabo who established the first accredited library-based high school program in the United States and who frequently preaches the gospel of the library as the people's university. 

This book is absolutely a love letter to libraries: a place where everything is available to everyone; a place that could serve someone like a man named Harry Pidgeon, in 1925 who completed a solo sailing trip around the world, only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator. 

That is powerful!

Honestly, I have so many highlights and notes in this book that I can't share them all here. If you are a book lover like I am (and I'm guessing that you are), you need to read this book for yourself. Usually I don't enjoy non-fiction very much, but this reads much more like a narrative. The writing is fantastic and the "characters" will keep you interested. The only problem I have with this book is that it proves that the written word can be dangerous: it has reignited (pun intended) my yearning to be a librarian, something I've long wished for but thought was an unrealistic career goal based on the expense of library school. Orlean's mother shared my dream:

I knew that if we had come here together, she would have reminded me just about now that if she could have chosen any profession in the world, she would have been a librarian.