by Susan Orlean
There have been a number of book burnings in the United States, mostly as statements of outrage over the content of the books. In the 1940s, for instance, a West Virginia schoolteacher named Mabel Riddle, with the support of the Catholic Church, began a campaign to collect and burn comic books because of their enthusiastic portrayal of crime and sex. The bonfire, which consumed several thousand comics, was so warmly received that the idea spread to towns across the country, and many local parishes sponsored their own comic-book fires. In a few instances, nuns lit the first match.
Burning books is an inefficient way to conduct a war, since books and libraries have no military value, but it is a devastating act. Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe. The deepest effect of burning books is emotional. When libraries burn, the books are sometimes described as being “wounded” or as “casualties,” just as human beings would be.
Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books. Destroying those books is a way of saying that the culture itself no longer exists; its history has disappeared; the continuity between its past and its future is ruptured. Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.
A few months after World War II ended and the libraries of Europe were still smoldering, a writer named Ray Bradbury began working on a story he called “The Fireman,” set in a fictional society that has outlawed books. If a book is discovered secreted away in someone’s home, firemen are summoned to burn it. Just like the Brenn-Kommandos, these firemen start fires rather than put them out. Bradbury was thirty years old when he started “The Fireman.” He grew up in Los Angeles and had been writing fantasy and science fiction since he was a teenager. He was soon selling stories to sci-fi magazines like Imagination, Amazing Stories, and Super Science Stories. He graduated from high school in 1938, the dead center of the Depression. His family couldn’t afford to send him to college. He had always loved the library, so as an alternative to college, he spent almost every day for the next thirteen years at the Los Angeles Public Library, reading his way through each department. He often referred to himself as “library-educated,” and he believed he’d learned more at the library than he would have at a university. “I began when I was fourteen and graduated at twenty-seven,” he said later. “I was in every damn room in the whole building. In some rooms, I read maybe one hundred books . . . All the poetry in the world. All the plays. All the murder mysteries. All the essays.” It began as a necessity for Bradbury, but soon libraries—especially Central Library—became his passion. “The library was my nesting place,” he wrote, “my birthing place; it was my growing place.”
Bradbury worked on “The Fireman” for a few months, grew frustrated with it, and put it aside. Four years later, the right-wing agitator Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech claiming that the State Department was riddled with Communists and “loyalty risks,” triggering a spasm of paranoia across the United States. Bradbury, who once described McCarthy as “that strange senator,” was horrified. He decided to try to finish “The Fireman,” which had eerie premonitions of the current state of politics.
Bradbury and his wife had four young daughters. When he tried to work at home, he spent more time playing with his children than writing. He couldn’t afford an office, but he knew of a room in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library, where typewriters could be rented for ten cents an hour. It occurred to him that there would be a fine symmetry if he wrote a book about book burning at a library. Over the course of nine days in the typewriter room at UCLA, Bradbury finished “The Fireman,” expanding it into a short novel. He spent $9.80 on the typewriter rental.
The story of “The Fireman” is haunting. The protagonist is a young fireman named Montag, who lives with his wife, Mildred. Their life seems orderly, but it is also featureless and constrained. Mildred shuffles through life like a sleepwalker, narcotized by an unceasing stream of televised entertainment and drugs. Montag appears to be an obedient fireman, but he has a dangerous secret: He has become curious about books and has begun squirreling away a few that he was assigned to burn. In his job, he has torched thousands of books obediently, but once he begins reading, he appreciates the weight of what he has destroyed. “For the first time,” he thinks, “I realized that a man was behind each one of the books.” One day, Mildred discovers him reading and reports him to his colleagues in the fire department, and they descend, burning down his house and his books. The firemen then try to kill him, but Montag manages to escape. He flees the city, and eventually, he stumbles on a camp of outcasts. They are book lovers, living on the lam, who are trying to preserve literature by memorizing books. They constantly recite to help them memorize; the encampment pulses with the sound of voices chanting Shakespeare and Proust all day long. As one member of the group tells Montag, they are “bums on the outside, libraries inside.” They are saving books by returning them to their origins—to the tradition of oral storytelling, which gave stories their durability before paper and ink could.
Unexpectedly, Bradbury’s description of books on fire isn’t horrible; in fact, they seem marvelous, almost magical. He describes them as “black butterflies” or roasted birds, “their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.” In the book, fire isn’t repulsive; it’s seductive—a gorgeous, mysterious power that can transmute material objects. Fire is “the thing man wanted to invent but never did.” The elegance of these descriptions makes the idea of incinerating books even more disturbing: It’s like a ballet depicting a million little murders.
When he finished writing the book, Bradbury tried to come up with a better title than “The Fireman.” He couldn’t think of a title he liked, so one day, on an impulse, he called the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department and asked him the temperature at which paper burned. The chief’s answer became Bradbury’s title: Fahrenheit 451. When Central Library burned in 1986, everything in the Fiction section from A through L was destroyed, including all of the books by Ray Bradbury.
Libraries burn during peacetime, too. There are about two hundred library fires a year in the United States, and countless more in libraries around the world. Many are caused by accidents such as short circuits, overheated fans, bad coffeepots, lightning strikes. Flames that leaped from a fireplace to a floorboard destroyed Harvard Library in 1764. A sparking floor fan resulted in the loss of all the books in Temple University’s law library in 1972. In 1988, one of the largest libraries in the world—the National Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad, which had a collection begun in 1714—was consumed by a huge fire that destroyed or damaged four hundred thousand books; millions more that were soaked with water were ruined. The fire was attributed to bad wiring. While the library was burning, firefighters didn’t go into the building; they just parked two dozen fire engines nearby and sprayed water on it for close to twenty-four hours. When the fire was finally extinguished, a bulldozer arrived to clear the piles of damaged books, but protesters turned it away. They then gathered the salvageable wet books and took them home, hung them on clotheslines, and attempted to repair them. The day after the fire, the director of the library, Vladimir Filov, told reporters that only five thousand dollars’ worth of books had been damaged. The following day, Filov was hospitalized with what was reported to be “heart problems.” He then disappeared from public view.
Many library fires are the result of casual vandalism. Over the years, lit matches tossed in book return slots caused many fires. Perhaps a few people mistook the book return for a trash receptacle, but most people probably did it because they were co
mpelled to do something stupid. These kinds of fires became so common that most libraries now have book drops separated from the main building, so if a fire breaks out in the drop, it will have nowhere to go.
For a long time, it was believed that the leading cause of library fires was careless smoking. Then libraries banned smoking. The number of fires should have declined, but in fact, they increased. Investigators now believe that the majority of library fires are deliberately set. Arson is a popular crime. In 1986, the year Central Library burned, 5,400 arsons were reported in Los Angeles. In most cases, arson is for profit—typically, someone will burn his or her own building in order to collect insurance money. Some fires are set to avenge a broken romance or a failed business deal. Some fires in government buildings are political statements. People sometimes set fires with plans to put them out so they will appear valiant. Firefighters call these “vanity fires” or “hero fires.” Fires are sometimes set to cover up other crimes. That is, a person might murder someone and then burn the building that contains the body so it becomes more difficult to investigate the murder or even know that it was a murder. (This is a movie plot cliché, but it happens to occur in real life.) Some fires are set by people who suffer from pyromania, an impulse control disorder that causes them to find gratification in seeing things burn.
Los Angeles has had its share of spectacular fires. It is a hot, dry, crackling city, a firebox. You have the sensation here of flame simmering just below the surface, brooding, lapping at underbrush; in the dry brush and parched grass you feel the presence of fire unborn, waiting to explode. The buildings burn and the hills burn. The fires in Los Angeles have names. The Thomas Fire. The La Tuna Fire. The Proud Bird Fire. The Station Fire. In the 1980s, a rash of fires broke out in and around Los Angeles, a hot ring necklacing the city. They were triggered by a simple incendiary device made of a lit cigarette, three matches, and a rubber band, wrapped in a piece of notebook paper. The majority of the arsons were in the city of Glendale, which abuts Los Angeles, and over the course of a few years, sixty-seven houses were destroyed there. Several fires were set near conventions of arson investigators; a few were set in hardware stores; many were on vacant lots. One at Warner Bros. Studios destroyed the set of The Waltons. By the mid-1980s, the fires caused by this little device had done millions of dollars in damage.
Around this time, a Glendale fire captain and arson expert named John Leonard Orr wrote a novel. He described Points of Origin to a literary agent as a fact-based work that followed a series of actual arsons. “As in the real case,” he wrote, “the arsonist in my novel is a firefighter.” The agent agreed to represent the book. When publishers asked about the novel’s uncanny parallels to the ongoing arsons in Los Angeles, the agent shrugged them off, saying, “We live in L.A.! Everyone’s got a script or book they’re trying to sell.” Shortly before the novel was shopped around to publishers, a Glendale hardware store called Ole’s Home Center burned down, killing four people. A similar scene was described in Points of Origin. Orr’s book was published in paperback by a company called Infinity Publishing. Even though he was a fire captain, something about Orr’s demeanor bothered the rest of the Glendale arson team, and they placed a tracking device in his car. It revealed that he had visited many of the arson sites just before the fires broke out. Later, his fingerprint was found at one scene. He was always considered a decent guy but also a bit of an oddball. As suspicion about him grew, detectives discovered Orr had once applied to the Los Angeles Police Department but was rejected because the police psychologist assessed him as being “schizoid.” Eventually, Orr was charged with more than twenty counts of arson and four counts of murder. He was convicted of most of the counts. He faced the death penalty but was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. He is thought to have set more than two thousand fires in and around Los Angeles. After he was incarcerated, the number of brush fires in the Glendale area dropped by ninety percent.
The fire at Central Library wasn’t the only time a library in Los Angeles burned. In 1982, the Hollywood Branch Library was destroyed by an arson fire that remains unsolved. It is believed that someone had started a small fire near the building that then spread out of control. The library was so badly damaged that it had to be torn down, and only twenty thousand of its books could be saved. Central Library itself burned two times after the main fire in April 1986. That September, a fire started in the middle of the music and arts collection, where a number of books and manuscripts were still on the shelves. It was relatively small compared to April’s seven-hour firestorm, and crews extinguished it in a quick thirty-six minutes. But investigators were baffled. The building had been closed to all but salvage crews and a skeleton staff of librarians. The room had only one access point, and a guard had inspected it fifteen minutes before the fire began. A man lingering outside the building during the fire was arrested, but it turned out he had been hanging around in hopes of selling marijuana. The library staff, already shaken by the main fire, was unnerved by the second one. A month later, another fire broke out, this time in the library’s basement. This one, at least, had an obvious source: A worker on the salvage crew accidentally dropped heated material in a chute to the basement, where it landed in a trash pile and began to burn.
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For a while, Arin Kasparian was making sandwiches at Subway. He didn’t think of it as a permanent career, but he was settling into the Subway life so comfortably that his mother began to worry. She wanted him to do something more worthwhile than making meatball marinara foot-longs, so she urged him to apply for a job at the library. At first Kasparian wasn’t interested—for one thing, he got free food at Subway—but his sister persuaded him to apply just to make their mother happy. “I had to choose between getting free sandwiches or being with books,” Kasparian said. “And making Ma happy.” Kasparian is in his mid-twenties, with mussy black hair and a chirpy, playful manner. When we spoke, he was at the circulation desk in the main lobby of Central Library, just starting his shift. “Applying for the library turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done,” he said. His real ambition had always been to direct movies, but then “reality hit,” as he puts it, and he took the full measure of how difficult it could be to achieve that goal. Now he plans to go to library school and become a children’s and young adult librarian. He said he wakes up in the morning feeling happy. “I feel like . . . I’m all right!” he said. “Everything’s good!”
In 1997, library school administrators began to notice that applications were inching up; that the average age of applicants was inching down; and that many library science students were coming from backgrounds in arts, or social justice, or technology. Many, or at least more than in the past, were male. A number of them had tattoos. Many said they were drawn to the profession because it combined information management with public good. Librarians also make a decent living. In the Los Angeles system, the entry level salary is more than sixty thousand dollars, and a division librarian, overseeing many branches, can earn close to two hundred thousand. The new, younger interest in the profession has changed it already. There is a comic-book series about a librarian; an action figure of beloved Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl; dozens of librarian blogs, including one called The World’s Strongest Librarian; and a sense that being a librarian is an opportunity to be a social activist championing free speech and immigrant rights and homelessness concerns while working within the Dewey decimal sy
stem. As far as I could tell, Kasparian was the end result of a change that might have dated from 1995, when Parker Posey played a library clerk in the independent film Party Girl.
Kasparian called out, “Next!” and a teenage girl with grass green hair stepped forward and checked out a graphic novel. After her, a good-looking older man in a taupe business suit checked out two travel guides to Taipei. Kasparian kept his eyes glued on the patrons’ faces while he waited on them, processing their books more by feel than by sight. When the businessman left, Kasparian whispered to me, “I never know if I should look or not look at what they’re checking out.” He grinned. “Sometimes I do look, and you just can’t believe such a book exists.” Just then, a woman a few spots back in the line waved to him. He told me she was a library patron—“I know her, but I don’t really know her. I mean, I know her from here, so I know her in that certain way . . .” He trailed off, not sure he was describing the relationship accurately. When the woman got up to the desk, Kasparian greeted her brightly and said he hadn’t seen her in a while. The woman smiled and said, “You’re right, I haven’t been here in a while. I had twins.”
Behind her was a sad-faced woman with her hair in a messy bun. She inhaled, exhaled, and then said, “I’m looking for a yoga book.”
