The Library Book

The Los Angeles Public Library lost some information about cardholders who registered in its system before 2009. Therefore, no one knew if Harry Peak ever had a library card. No one even knew if he had ever been inside Central Library. During her visits to Central Library, Orlean realized that a library is more than a place where books are stored; it’s also “an intricate machine” (59). Libraries aren’t quiet, as many people think. The shipping department begins work in the basement before dawn. This is the part of the library that handles books which are traveling between branches. Activity in this department rapidly grew after the advent of the Internet. In the past, the department was able to transport books in vans; they now require trucks. The employees pack and tag books as though they were luggage going through an airport.

The department is aware of reading trends. For instance, if they are packing “dozens of copies” of the same book, it’s probably because Oprah Winfrey recently recommended the book (61). After Thanksgiving, there are ample requests for diet books. SAT study guides and financial advice guides move quickly in the spring. During Orlean’s visit, there was one woman working in the shipping department—Barbara Davis, a brawny black woman who is nearing retirement. Though Davis wasn’t a reader, she liked working at the library. She found reading pointless—a task that yielded few results.

The public nature of public libraries is unusual. There are few places in which everyone is welcome for free. The library is also the only place that welcomes the homeless. Orlean took a trip with John Szabo to the Washington Irving Branch of the LA Public Library in the neighborhood of Crenshaw, which suffers from high unemployment and crime. The library was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 but never met earthquake standards. It is also cramped and lacks sufficient parking spaces. Still, the community relied upon it. In 1990, the city announced that it would close the branch and build a new one 13 blocks away. Despite community protests, the city council built a new library, leaving the old one empty with boarded windows.

Orlean and Szabo met Eloisa Sarao, the library’s assistant business manager, who unlocked the front door of the neglected former branch. There was litter everywhere from squatters. Szabo went to the former branch “to check on its condition and try to appease neighbors who were dismayed by its dilapidation” (70). Despite insufficient funds, he was considering what he could do to appease those who lived nearby. Part of a city librarian’s job is to decide what happens with old library property.

After this visit, Szabo and Orlean drove to City Hall to meet with Alisa Orduña, LA’s director of homelessness policy. Many libraries told Orlean that one of the key questions they face is how to welcome homeless people while also ensuring that other patrons are comfortable around those who smell bad or who may be mentally ill. Orduña noted that there is a policy about the size allowance for backpacks. She and Szabo discussed the possibility of having checkrooms for large items so that homeless people could bring in the belongings that they keep at camps. Szabo then requested funding for his homeless outreach program, which he called The Source. Orduña asked if Szabo could allow social workers to meet with homeless patrons, but Szabo was unsure. He did, however, think that he could send bookmobiles to places where homeless families lived, as he had in Atlanta. He wanted to do this without “[going] through the ordinary municipal channels” (74). Through this system, it takes a couple of years to get anything, even a new vacuum cleaner.

Orlean then accompanied Szabo to his next appointment, in Little Tokyo. The neighborhood’s branch library opened in 2005. The discussion with the head of this branch involved parking arrangements with a building next door and plans for what to do with empty land between the library’s backyard and an exclusive restaurant called Redbird. Orlean noticed that Little Tokyo’s library had an extensive manga collection. She remained in the reading room while Szabo searched for the branch’s head librarian. Walking among the bookshelves, Orlean noticed two elderly men and an old woman browsing in the children’s section and talking to each other in Japanese. She realized that they were going to use the picture books to develop their English skills.

Szabo left his meeting and said that the parking problem was resolved. Also, the library was going to allow the proprietors of the Redbird to turn the empty lot into a park. Around five o’clock in the evening, Szabo had one last meeting with Kren Malone, who would soon become director of Central Library. Eva Mitnick, the current director, was appointed director of engagement and learning—a new position that Szabo invented to ensure services for bilingual and multilingual librarians, immigrants, and veterans. Malone is African American and worked at the library for 17 years around the time of Orlean’s visit.

One of the conversations between Malone and Szabo involved funding lead poisoning tests at Boyle Heights Branch Library for 21,000 households in the area who may have been affected by soil contamination. Exide Technologies ran a battery recycling plant in the neighborhood. Before Malone left the meeting, Szabo mentioned that he would soon return for the first ever graduation for the 22 adults who were receiving their high school diplomas through the Career Online High School (COHS), which Szabo started in 2014.

When the world heard about the fire at Central Library, letters of condolence poured in from Belgium, Japan, England, Germany, France, and other countries. The staff members at Central Library still showed up to work, but didn’t know what they should have been doing. They were also united in their despondency and their fear that the arsonist would strike again. They wondered if it was a staff member who set the fire. Investigators, too, considered this possibility. They questioned those who called in sick on the day of the fire. Morale was so low among staff members that 24 of the central branch’s 250 librarians put in transfer requests. In some instances, some librarians’ depressions impacted their marriages. A psychologist was soon brought in to direct group therapy sessions. 

Seven hundred new books arrive at the library each month. If a book is popular, it gets checked out so often that it can start to fall apart within a year. Baby name books are among these. Some people borrow books and never return them. The works of Carlos Castaneda are among these, as are the works of conspiracy theorist David Icke. Files about the Manson and Black Dahlia murders have also disappeared. In 1981, investigators found a woman selling library books out of a hotel suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She reaped around $40,000 a year from this business. The following year, investigators also found 10,000 books in the home of a hoarder named Glenn Swartz.

For many years, movie studios were the Los Angeles Public Library’s main culprits of book theft. Studios often sent assistants to the library to take books, causing the library to employ someone whose main job it was to repossess books that were not returned. The library also once employed a bookbinder whose job it was to bind reference materials. Now, rare and expensive books are sent to private restorers for this service. Librarians throw out easily replaceable books when they begin to fall apart. The Los Angeles Public Library was among the first to go online, in 1994. In 2015, the library’s website had 11 million hits. Some of its visitors were hackers, most of them based in China or Russia. Orlean asked Matthew Mattson, who supervises the system, why people would hack into a library’s web system. Mattson told her that were practicing to learn how to hack into more sophisticated systems.

Each day, most of Central Library’s 3.4 million photographs are scanned and posted online. These include photos from Ansel Adams, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1939 and began documenting the aerospace industry, and from African American photographer Roland [sic] Curtis, who photographed the city’s African American community in the 1950s and 1960s. Both photographers donated their archives to the library. The Valley Times, a newspaper that was published from 1940s to the 1970s, donated 45,000 images after it shut down. It will take four years to scan all of the former newspaper’s photos for the online database. Additionally, LA Resistance, an antiwar group that operated from 1967 to 1971, donated its posters, pictures, leaflets, and other materials to the library.

After leaving the Digitization Department, Orlean walked around the building. Shortly before she learned about the fire at Central Library, Orlean decided that she would stop writing books. Returning to the library helped her change her mind. She remembered how important the library was to her when she was little. The memories comforted Orlean, whose mother’s memory was slipping further away due to dementia. Orlean realized that she needed to write the book to retain the memory of libraries that she and her mother once shared.