The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  By midday, reports of the fire were all over the local news. Patty Evans, an administrator at the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, had worked for almost two years to figure out how to finance the renovation of Central Library. The day of the fire, she was on jury duty, so she didn’t have access to the news. When the court recessed for lunch, she called her office to check in. Her secretary told her to take a deep breath, then explained that the library was on fire. Evans ran back to the jury room and requested a sidebar with the judge, who agreed to let her leave. When she arrived at the library, she decided to circumvent city bureaucracy and gave an interview to the local television reporters, asking city residents to come downtown and volunteer once the fire was extinguished.

  People in the rare-book world were paying special attention to the news from the library. Olivia Primanis, a book conservator with an expertise in mold and mildew, lived in Texas but happened to be in Los Angeles that week. When the head of paper conservation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art heard about the fire, she called Primanis and said, “The library is on fire. You need to get there.”

  Even though a fire was storming inside, the library didn’t look distressed if you viewed it from the street. The stucco was smooth and undisturbed. The limestone facing of the outer walls was cool as satin. The statuary gazed sightlessly into the middle distance. The windows glanced and glittered in the sunlight. It was quiet. Except for the pale trickle of smoke from the roof, you might not have known anything was amiss. Then, suddenly, with a bright, hard snap, the windows on the west side of the library exploded and the red arms of flame punched outward and upward, slapping at the stone facade. One of the library commissioners watching from the sidewalk burst into tears. The librarians recoiled. One said she felt like she was watching a horror movie. According to librarian Glen Creason, the breeze was filled with “the smell of heartbreak and ashes.”

  In the building, the air began to quiver with radiant heat. Crews trying to make their way into the stacks felt like they were hitting a barricade, as if the heat had become solid. “We could only stand it for ten, fifteen seconds,” one of them told me. “Then we hotfooted out of there.” The temperature reached 2000 degrees. Then it rose to 2500. 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. As firefighters put it, it’s the moment when a fire in a room is transformed into a room on fire. With the temperature as high as it was, there was a great potential for flashover, which would have made the chance of saving anything nearly impossible.

  The main body of the fire moved on, traveling three hundred feet along the second floor of the library, then stopping to lap at the catwalk leading to the southeast stack. The crews attacked it from the west side, taking fifteen-minute turns on the hose lines, hitting the fire again and again with a heavy jet of water. A salvage team battered the walls with sledgehammers, breaching the stifling tube of the stacks. The superheated air flooded out of the stacks into the reading rooms, like heat spilling out of an open oven door.

  The sixth and seventh tiers of shelving in the northwest stacks collapsed.

  The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both. Many of the books that hadn’t burned were waterlogged. Their covers and pages bulged like balloons. Salvage crews pushed their way through the building in advance of the hose teams, throwing plastic sheeting over the shelves, doing their best to protect the books before the spraying began. On the third floor, Heavy Utility Company 27 jackhammered a series of eighteen holes through the concrete to vent some of the terrible heat.

  Finally, after over five hours, the liquid spill of flames slowed, yielding to the torrents of water and to the cool air that was wafting through the holes jackhammered through the ceiling and floors. The fire pulled back from the southeast section of the building and curled up in the northeast stacks, where it glowered angrily, feeding itself book after book, a monster snacking on chips. Fire crews punched more holes—in the third floor, in the walls of the stacks, in the roof. The fresh April air mingled with the smothering heat inside, easing the temperature down bit by bit. As the fire shrank, firefighters dug deeper and drenched it.

  The flames in the northwest stacks withered and went out.

  The fire in the northeast stacks, where it had begun, still smoldered, but it no longer had the fierceness it had earlier in the day: By this point it had burned through most of its fuel. The books in the northeast stacks were crumbles, ashes, powder, and charred pages heaped a foot deep. The last flags of fire fluttered, seethed, settled, and finally died. It had required 1,400 bottles of oxygen; 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, “a knockdown,” at six thirty P.M. on April 29, 1986. It had raged for seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.

  3.

  What Every Home Owner Needs to Know About Mold and What to Do About It (2003)

  By Lankarge, Vicki

  693.893 L289

  The Preservation of Leather Bookbindings (1894)

  By Plenderleith, H. J.

  025.7 P725

  A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (2003)

  By Basbanes, Nicholas A.

  085.1 B297

  The Hoppin ’N’ Poppin Popcorn Cookbook (1995)

  By Steer, Gina

  641.65677 S814

  What was lost: A volume of Don Quixote from 1860, illustrated by French printmaker Gustave Doré. All of the books about the Bible, Christianity, and church history. All biographies of subjects H through K. All American and British plays. All theater history. All Shakespeare. Ninety thousand books about computers, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, seismology, engineering, and metallurgy. All of the unbound manuscripts in the Science Department. A book by architect Andrea Palladio from the 1500s. Five and a half million American patent listings dating from 1799, with drawings and descriptions. All Canadian patent material from approximately the same period. Forty-five thousand works of literature, authors A through L. A leaf from a 1635 Coverdale Bible, which was the first complete translation in modern English. The entire collection of the Jane’s annuals for aircraft, dating back several decades. Nine thousand business books. Six thousand magazines. Eighteen thousand social science books. A first edition of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book from 1896. Twelve thousand cookbooks, including six books of popcorn recipes. All of the art periodicals and every single art book printed on glossy paper, which dissolves into a gluey mush when exposed to water. Every ornithology book. Three quarters of all the library’s microfilm. The information labels on twenty thousand photographs, which fell off when they got wet. Any book accidentally shelved in the sections that burned; we will never know what they were, so we cannot know what we are missing. In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

  The place stayed hot for five days. Little fires flared up here and there, ignited by the ambient heat. The temperature lingered close to 100 degrees, so firefighters continued to wear protective gear and breathing apparatus and needed to rotate out after ten minutes inside. Immediately after the main blaze was out, crews hurried to “de-water” the basement and main floor. So much water had collected that engineers worried the floors might collapse under the weight. The engineers wanted to cool down t
he building but couldn’t risk damaging more books with water. They wanted to clear debris to break up hot spots, but Chief Manning instructed them to leave the site undisturbed, to preserve anything investigators might need to help determine what had set it off.

  The librarians stayed at the library for the seven and a half hours that the fire blazed, and they stayed after it was put out. As soon as the fire department permitted it, almost all two hundred of them entered the building. Inside, it was filthy, smoky, and slick from water mixed with debris. The ash was ankle-deep. The melted shelving looked grotesque. Wyman Jones declared that the interior of the library looked “like an el cheapo movie set, done by scab special-effects men.” Glen Creason and another librarian, Roy Stone, made their way into the stacks to get a sense of what had survived. They were also looking for Roy’s wife’s handbag; she was a librarian, too, and had left the bag behind when the alarm sounded. They didn’t see the handbag, so Creason and Stone climbed out of the stacks and went to the Patent Room, where they came upon mounds of soot and a long row of molten typewriters. Billie Connor, a children’s librarian, walked through the mess with Helene Mochedlover. Connor and Mochedlover are both retired now, but they still come to the library often, and one day we sat and talked about their experience of the fire. The room we were in happened to be one of the most badly burned and is now a handsomely appointed meeting room. They spoke about the fire as if it had happened earlier that morning. Connor said when they entered the building immediately after the fire, they felt like they’d died and gone to see if Dante knew what he was writing about. Mochedlover, who is birdlike and energetic, said she was as upset the day of the fire as she was the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn’t get her period for the next four months.

  The books that survived the fire were in piles where they’d fallen or jammed with their sticky backs together on the shelves. Olivia Primanis, the book conservator, told Wyman Jones that they had to move quickly and freeze the books because mold spores begin to bloom within forty-eight hours after being activated by water. If the books got moldy, they would be unsalvageable. That meant the staff would have to pack, move, and store seven hundred thousand damaged books somewhere cold before mold erupted.

  By evening, news of the fire had spread around the city. Hundreds of volunteers came down to the library to help without even knowing what they could offer. There were only a handful of hard hats available and no boxes for the books and no place to store them. Wet books couldn’t simply be put in a warehouse, either, because of the danger of mold. Some years earlier, the Bonaventure Hotel, near the library, had offered space in their restaurant freezer if a rare book got wet and needed to be frozen until a conservator could tend to it. However, the Bonaventure’s freezer couldn’t hold seven hundred thousand soggy books. Los Angeles has a multimillion-dollar fish-processing industry and one of the largest produce depots in the country, so there were huge freezers in town. Someone suggested contacting a few of those fish and produce companies. Though their freezers were full, the companies agreed to clear some space for the books.

  The volunteers were sent home with instructions to come back at dawn. Radio and television stations put out a call for more volunteers to come to the library the next day. The Junior League contacted its members and urged them to help out, warning, “This is an enormous and dirty job [that is] moderately to somewhat physical, so please dress accordingly.” IBM gave its employees time off to volunteer. 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 the 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.

  It was a huge job. The wet, smoky books needed to be removed, along with every other book in the library; the building had to be emptied so it could eventually be repaired. Wyman Jones decided not to publicly disclose where the books were being stored, in case the fire had been intentional and the arsonist was looking for them.

  With Lundquist directing, the volunteers worked for the next three days around the clock. Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, diligently and peacefully. They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

  The volunteers packed more than fifty thousand boxes, each of which held fifteen tightly packed books. Once the boxes were full, they were stacked on pallets—eventually, they filled more than eighteen hundred—and then loaded onto trucks. The dry, undamaged books were taken to a city depository. The wet and smoke-damaged books were taken in refrigerated trucks to the food warehouses, where they were stored on racks between frozen shrimp and broccoli florets at an average temperature of 70 below 0. 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.

  As the books were carted away, investigators combed through the building, taking note of the pattern of burn marks on the floor and the path of the flames. In spite of the fire code violations and the fact that a building full of books and bad wiring could have gone up in flames almost spontaneously, investigators believed almost from the beginning that the fire was intentional. This was a conservative assumption, because library fires in the United States are almost always what are known in fire terminology as “incendiary”—namely, a fire caused by human intervention. Most are the result of casual vandalism that gets out of hand.

  Los Angeles employed nineteen arson investigators. Twenty agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms joined them on the case. The team’s first concern was to find a clue to how the fire started—maybe a frayed wire that sparked, or a telltale spot of lighter fluid, or a match carelessly tossed near a magazine. The city posted a $20,000 reward for information about the fire’s origin. The ATF added $5,000, and an anonymous donor put up $5,000 more.

  After two days of studying the building, investigators weren’t close to any conclusions, but the word “arson” began slipping into stories about the fire. The Los Angeles Daily News ran a story with the headline ARSON STRONGLY SUSPECTED IN FIRE AT CENTRAL LIBRARY. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that library employees were being shown a composite drawing of a “stranger.” On May 6, only a week after the fire, a story in the Los Angeles Times announced LIBRARY FIRE WAS ARSON, BRADLEY AND FIRE CHIEF SAY. Chief Manning was quoted saying, “Without any reservation . . . we can now tell you that it was an arson fire.” According to Manning, they were looking for “a blondish man in his late twenties or thirties who was seen by several employees near the fire’s point of origin . . . six feet tall, 165 pounds, with blue eyes, blond hair, a light mustache, and a rather thin face. He was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a casual shirt.” A composite sketch was released. The man depicted in the sketch had a wide forehead and large eyes, an aquiline nose, the brushy mustache of a cartoon crook, and abundant blond hair that formed a soft corona around his head and winged out in half curls over his ears. You would not swear it was Harry Peak, nor would you swear it wasn’t.

  During the week, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl dominated every newspaper around the world except for Pravda, which covered it briefly but managed to find ample room to report on the fire at Central Library. After that first terrifying week of Chernobyl passed, American papers found space
to cover the library fire; around the country, there were stories with headlines like BLAZE DESTROYS VALUABLE BOOKS; FLAMES GUT L.A. LIBRARY; A CITY TRAGEDY; FIRE CHARS COLLECTION; UP IN SMOKE. The Boston Globe suggested the events in Chernobyl and in Los Angeles had a “ghostly symmetry” because each raised the primal fear of a fire that was beyond control, along with our dread of menacing and unmanageable power.

  Central Library had been a busy place. Each year, more than nine hundred thousand books were loaned; six million reference questions were answered; and seven hundred thousand people passed through the doors. Two days after the fire, it was empty except for the powdery black remains of four hundred thousand destroyed books. The statuary was draped in white plastic tarps. The walls and ceilings were tarred and grimy, the reading rooms vacant. All the entrances were locked and beribboned with police tape. A few flattened boxes lay on the sidewalks on Fifth Street, near the entrance to the library, where someone had hung a handwritten sign that said: THANK YOU, L.A.! WE WILL BE BACK BIGGER AND BETTER.

  4.

  All about California, and the Inducements to Settle There (1870)*

  *folded leaf of plates, maps

  By California Immigrant Union

  979.4 C1527

  Migration and the Southern California Economy (1964)

  By Southern California Research Council

  330.9794 S727-7

  San Jacinto Cemetery Inscriptions, 1888–2003 (2003)

  By Hall, Dale

  Gen 979.41 S227Ha

  The Postman Always Rings Twice (1944)

  By Cain, James M.

  Harry Peak’s sister, Debra, likes to describe their family as one with unending woes. She doesn’t say this in a tone of self-pity or dismay but with the dispassion of an appraiser describing a universe where luck, fortune, tragedy, and disaster are meted out randomly. By Debra’s accounting, this Peak unluckiness isn’t shameful or stigmatizing; it’s just a coin toss that landed the wrong way.