I love the library. I love the smell of the library. Growing up, my family frequently visited the East Library, and I can distinctly remember doing their summer reading challenges. My favorite book to check out was Frank and Ernest Play Ball (this book is still awesome, and we have a copy for our boys). 

The Library Book will resurface all of your nostalgic library memories while tying it to the story of the fire that tore through Los Angeles’ historic Central Library.  Susan Orleans tells a great story which includes the fire, the fire investigation/suspect pursuit, and the underpinnings of the library world. I enjoyed learning about the systems that make libraries go and the history behind libraries as an institution. 

I appreciated the way Orleans discussed the messiness of libraries. Public libraries exist as one of the only places in society where everyone is welcome, and there is no cost. Libraries were founded to be a free source of knowledge for everyone..and library leaders mean it. Libraries are on the front lines of homelessness and mental health issues around the globe, especially in urban areas, and I thought the commentary/storytelling throughout the book was thoughtful, balanced, and funny.

Quotes

“That year, President Roosevelt sent a message to the American Booksellers  Association. ‘Books cannot be killed by fire,’ he declared. ‘People die, but books never die.’”

“The architect of this building may have been a great architect, but he didn’t know his fanny from a hot rock when it came to fire protection.”

“Then it rose to 2500 degrees. The firefighters began to worry about a flashover, a dreaded situation during a fire in which everything in a closed space—even smoke—becomes so hot that it reaches the point of spontaneous ignition, causing a complete and consuming eruption of fire from every surface.”

“The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both.”

“13,440 square feet of salvage covers; two acres of plastic sheeting; ninety bales of sawdust; more than three million gallons of water; and the majority of the city of Los Angeles’s firefighting personnel and equipment, but the library fire was at last declared extinguished,”

“The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library. Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer and former popcorn distributor who had reinvented himself as an expert in drying out wet things. The notion of putting books in with groceries didn’t faze Lundquist, since he’d freeze-dried his first salvaged books alongside a summer’s worth of peas and carrots from his garden.”

“The wet and smoke-damaged books were taken in refrigerated trucks to the food warehouses, where they were stored on racks between shrimp and broccoli florets at an average temperature of 70 below zero. No one really knew when the wrecked books would be thawed out or how many of them could be saved. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.”

“Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous. The good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad. Often, at the library, society’s problems are magnified. Homelessness and drug use and mental illness are problems you see in every public place in Los Angeles. One difference is that if you see a mentally ill person on the street, you can cross to the other side. In a library, you share a smaller and more intimate space. The communal nature of a library is the very essence of the library, in the shared desks and shared books and shared restrooms

“because libraries were increasingly moving in the direction of functioning as information centers as well as being repositories of book collections.”

“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.”