The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  A gray-haired man in a baggy brown coat approached the desk holding a list of twenty movie titles in alphabetical order, starting with Anaconda and Gigli. “Can I get these?” he asked Kasparian, who nodded and said, “You certainly can!”

  A young man with hair in braids that reached his waist came up next, saying, “Where would I find an AA book?”

  Two middle-aged men, wearing matching polo shirts, checked out three guides to Disney World.

  A small woman with a head of brown ringlets came to the desk and dropped a towering pile of Magic Tree House books on the desk. “For my eight-year-old daughter,” she said to Kasparian without being asked. “She just can’t get enough of these.”

  A young man with a shaved head, returning fifteen books. “Some of these are overdue,” he said. Kasparian looked at his computer and said the fines came to $10.40. “Okay,” the young man said with deliberation, “I’ll pay ten dollars.”

  At the desk beside Kasparian, Nelson Torres was at the end of his shift. He told me he always knew he wanted to work with the public because he considers himself friendly and easygoing. He said he never had been much of a reader, but he started working at the library when he was in high school and has stayed ever since. While he was talking, a man approached the desk and asked if the library had a DVD of a television show called Devious Maids.

  “That’s a good show,” Torres said, nodding. As he was looking up where Devious Maids was shelved, a woman stopped and patted his desk. “How’s your mother, Nelson?” she said. “Great,” he said to her, and then turned back to the man and gave directions to Devious Maids.

  Another library assistant, Garrett Langan, walked over from behind the desk and put his hand on Torres’s shoulder. “You’re done, Nelson,” Langan said, laughing. “The guards will put your chains back on now.”

  Selena Terrazas, the principal librarian whose fiefdom includes the Computer Center, the reference desk, the Children’s and Teen Department, and the circulation desk, strolled by and cast an appraising eye on the scene. She is a warm, droll woman with blue hair and fashionable glasses. She looked at her fitness tracker and said, “I put on ten thousand steps a day running around this building!” and then disappeared into the workroom behind the desk.

  When I turned back to Kasparian, he was helping a young man from England apply for a library card. A woman with wild hair and a dirty pink backpack ambled by, looking woozy. Kasparian said that when he first started working at the library, “the sight of the homeless was kind of scary,” but now he recognizes many of them, so it isn’t as scary. He said knowing them actually made him feel good, and in his words, “they sort of give me energy.” I asked him to elaborate, and he said, “It makes me feel . . . important.” He sounded a little bashful, and then added, “Like I’m doing something that really helps.”

  11.

  Downtown with Huell Howser [videorecording]/#110, Church of the Open Door (2007)

  DVD 979.41 L88Do-6

  ARCO at 125 Years: Celebrating the Past, Anticipating the Future (1992)

  By Cook, Lodwrick M.

  338.78 A8815Co

  Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State (1941)

  By Writers’ Program of The Works Projects Administration in the State of Missouri

  977.8 W956

  How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters (1996)

  By Warwick, Mal

  361.73 W331

  To have been city librarian of Los Angeles at the time of the fire would have been trying. The staff was distraught. The main library was closed, with no schedule for reopening. Insurance helped cover damage to the building—the cracked concrete, the layers of soot and grime, the holes drilled into the roof by the fire department. Actually, Central Library, with its thick skin, had weathered the fire quite well. What the insurance didn’t cover was the building’s contents. The estimated cost of replacing the four hundred thousand lost books was over $14 million—$6 million for books, $6 million for periodicals, and over $2 million for the patent collection and other science and technology documents. The cost of storing and repairing the seven hundred thousand damaged books could only be guessed at. The money to restock the library simply didn’t exist.

  Wyman Jones

  The city librarian, Wyman Jones, considered himself well acquainted with struggle. He was born in Missouri in 1929. His father had been a high school principal, but his extended family were dirt farmers. “It was really bad for us, the Depression,” he told me recently. I had called him in Portland, Oregon, where he moved after retiring from the library. When I first explained that I was writing a book about the library, he said he wouldn’t talk to me because he was planning to write his own book on the subject. He said he was going to call his book “Downwind of a Belly Dancer.” After insisting in forceful terms that he had no intention of granting me an interview, he kept me on the phone over an hour. This was the pattern every time we spoke over the next several months: He would tell me why he wasn’t going to talk to me, and then he wouldn’t let me off the phone. Sometimes I made up fake excuses to hang up after an hour or so, when my hand had gotten tired from taking notes or I had to cook dinner. Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in a mirror while punching you. “Before you write your book, you should really learn something about libraries,” he said more than once. “What do you know about it? You’re not a librarian.” During our first conversation, he returned several times to the subject of the Depression, then repeated that it had been very hard for his family. “I’m not trying to convince you, Susan,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

  Jones ran library systems in Texas before he came to Los Angeles. He had the reputation there as a builder of branches, and when he arrived in California in 1970, he intended to tear down Central Library and construct something newer, bigger, and at a different address. He had no attachment to the landmark Bertram Goodhue Building. Whenever we talked about the building, he dismissed it as the work of a “prima donna architect” who didn’t know “a damn thing about libraries.” He thought Goodhue was overrated in general. “The architectural world doesn’t think much of this building,” he said. I told him that I had actually read a lot of praise for it, and that many architects considered it something of a masterpiece. “Well, there may be a certain amount of public sentimentality because people used to go there to read or something like that,” he said, practically snorting. “I don’t like anyone kidding me by telling me it’s a wonderful piece of architecture.”

  When a coalition of architects, preservationists, and urban planners prevailed and the city finally decided to renovate and expand Central rather than tear it down, Jones conceded the point and grudgingly oversaw the plans. He treated the fire as just one more thing in a long list of annoyances visited upon him in his twenty years as city librarian. “Look, I went through three earthquakes and three riots while I was there,” he said one afternoon when we were on the phone. “That, plus three heart attacks.” He said he found the librarians often maddening and always too liberal. (“Their union is ridiculous. Twenty years I ran that place, and they never gave me credit for a single thing.”) Worse were city administrators, whom he regarded with particular disgust. “City council? I thought of them as a difficult girlfriend,” he said. “You got to do a magic trick, you got to play the piano for them, you got to keep them happy, that’s all. I just had too many years of working with second-rate politicians and incompetents. And you know what? I worked so hard and so long, and still I never took a single bribe.” He told me that he was so well-known in Los Angeles during his tenure at the library that he couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. I was surprised to hear this, because I don’t think most people recognize the head of libraries in their city, especially out of context, but Jones insisted that if he had dinner out at a restaurant, he would be buttonholed countless times. “I was at the library twenty years. Twenty years! I couldn’t go anywhere without someone wanting something from
me. Do you know what that’s like? Can you see why I wouldn’t retire in a city like that?” he asked me. “Can you understand why I moved?” When I didn’t respond immediately, he snapped, “Hey, give me an answer! Don’t try to please me. Tell me why I had to move.”

  Even if the city had a spare $14 million sitting around, restocking a major library like Central would have been a chore. Jones said that many of the books were out of print, and the ones that were available had to be ordered from seven thousand different vendors. “It takes enormous expertise to know where to get these damn things in the first place,” Jones said sharply. “It takes a lot of time and a hell of a lot of money. Do you think it would be easy? Do you? Well, believe me, it wasn’t.”

  Lodwrick Cook, the head of ARCO, was the cochairman of the “Save the Books” campaign, which was formed to raise funds to replace the library’s lost books. Cook could see the library from his offices on Fifth Street, and as soon as the fire was tamped down, he offered Wyman Jones and the library’s administrative staff space in the ARCO offices. ARCO’s head of public relations, Carlton Norris, warned the librarians that “oil people on occasion . . . use terse, coarse, and direct language” that they might find disconcerting, but Jones nonetheless accepted the offer.

  The librarians were used to scrimping on a municipal budget, so they were awed by the luxury of ARCO’s offices. According to Carlton Norris, the collating copy machine was the greatest source of wonder. The ARCO staff was, in turn, awed by the librarians. Norris said many of them had grown up in oil towns so small they didn’t have libraries. They viewed the librarians as elegant, learned, refined.

  Lodwrick Cook kicked off Save the Books with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar gift from ARCO and began rallying support. He wrote personal letters to half of Hollywood. “Dear George,” he wrote to director George Lucas, “a terrible tragedy summons you and me . . . God knows you are besieged almost hourly with someone plucking at your lapel, asking for money . . . but the Library is singularly the seedbed and the feeding ground for the creative community in this town.” He wrote to Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who agreed to serve on the committee once he heard that Lew Wasserman, who owned Universal Studios, had signed on. Together, Valenti and Cook sent letters to every studio head and major producer in the city, asking for contributions. The goal was to raise $10 million to save the city’s books.

  The solicitations went out immediately. The money came fast. Some of the donations were large. The J. Paul Getty Trust, for instance, gave $2 million; the Times Mirror Foundation, which then owned the Los Angeles Times, gave $500,000. Sidney Sheldon, the author of best-selling potboilers such as The Other Side of Midnight, gave $25,000. Dr. Seuss gave $10,000. Some donations were just a few dollars. Many of the small donations were accompanied by notes explaining why the donor wanted to support the library. The reasons were myriad. “Why would an old couple in San Francisco give to the Los Angeles Library to save the books?” one note read. “Well, [my] father collapsed and died in the LA Public Library on July 17, 1952. Heart Attack or stroke. I never found out which. Good luck with your campaign.” There were donations of books, including a complete hardbound set by Louis L’Amour from his widow; a large collection from the family of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs; fourteen hundred cookbooks from the estate of a collector. Charlton Heston threw a fund-raiser cocktail party for Save the Books. Outdoor advertising companies donated almost sixty billboards around the city to help spread the word.

  Mayor Tom Bradley urged his constituents to give whatever they could. Library fund-raising spread across the city. Schoolkids held bottle and aluminum can drives. Neighborhoods had Save the Books yard sales. There was a shared sense of purpose in the city that many people found inspiring. It was another version of that volunteer brigade on the day of the fire: Strangers working side by side, book by book, to save what the fire had missed. In a city that could seem at times fractured and fractious, concern for the library offered a rare experience of being glued together. Still, every now and then, objections were raised. “Dear Mayor Bradley,” one dissenter wrote,

  I find it obscene that people are eager to spend vast sums of money to save BOOKS when dozens of beautiful, healthy, intelligent, loving dogs and cats are put to sleep by the city EVERY DAY, because the city is TOO DAMN CHEAP to keep animals up for adoption . . . As usual, their needs continue to be forgotten, while a momentarily fashionable cause is subscribed to by a bunch of PRETENSION INTELLECTUALS. PS: And let’s not forget the dolphins that are dying in Santa Monica Bay. ‘Save the Books’ indeed!

  The committee brainstormed other fund-raising schemes to complement the donations. Jones suggested holding the world’s biggest bingo game (the proposal was voted down). Someone else suggested a Los Angeles Lakers inter-squad charity game with celebrity coaches, such as Joan Van Ark from Knots Landing (approved and scheduled, with Coach Van Ark on duty). A shop with Save the Books merchandise (mugs, bookmarks, T-shirts) opened in the lobby of the ARCO building. A big-ticket fund-raising gala featuring Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson was organized with military precision, including providing library supporters with conversation topics for the special guests. Lodwrick Cook’s wife was given a briefing sheet warning that Sarah Ferguson “is not interested in fashion or hairstyles” and that Prince Andrew “is not into sports, but Sarah is.”

  Twenty thousand schoolkids and two thousand adults entered the Save the Books essay contest, which offered round-trip tickets to Europe among its prizes. The essay subject was “What the Library Means to Me.” Ray Bradbury was one of the judges. The winning essays were deep, disquieting, and darkly emotional. Most of them read like confessions of an almost brutal sense of loneliness, eased only by a place like the library, where lonely people can feel slightly less lonely together. “For years, I was a castle in the library, sharing a countryside of silence, in silence, with others similarly locked in their own solitude . . .” one began. “I began to understand the planet I live on and learned to hang on to my hope . . . and somehow the sadness of everyday life around me became bearable . . .”

  A winning entry was a poem written by a librarian named Jill Crane, who had worked on the cleanup after the fire. It began:

  We held charred and watersoaked

  chunks of books in our hands.

  history, imagination, knowledge

  crumbling in our fingers.

  we packed what was left.

  Just across from the library’s south entrance and a block from the ARCO building sat a hulking turn-of-the-century structure on Hope Street with a four-thousand-seat auditorium and a facade spanned by nine large archways. For decades, the building had been the tallest in Los Angeles. It was built originally as the headquarters of an evangelical Christian congregation called the Church of the Open Door. The building’s neon signs, which spelled out JESUS SAVES, could be seen from almost anywhere in town, and hymns blasted from the carillon twice a day could be heard almost as widely.

  As its downtown membership dwindled, the Church of the Open Door decided to relocate to the suburbs. The building was sold in 1986 to Gene Scott, the pastor of a Pentacostal congregation known as the Westcott Christian Center. Scott was a Stanford Ph.D. from rural Idaho who described himself as “the most agnostic believer and the most believing agnostic.” After youthful rebellion, followed by slightly less youthful introspection—all of which is detailed in his essay “A Philosopher Looks at Christ”—Scott began preaching in 1968. He attracted an ardent following. Beginning in 1975, his services were televised on the Faith Broadcasting Network. Within a few years, his show was broadcast around the clock and could be seen in 180 countries. His followers viewed his sermons as prescriptive. The staff at Central Library noticed that whenever Scott preached about a particular book, there was an enormous uptick in requests for it. Scott occasionally discussed what he believed was the mystical power of the Great Pyramids. Whenever he did, there was a run on Peter Tompkins’s Secrets of
the Great Pyramid at the library.

  Scott didn’t comport himself like an ordinary church elder. He had lush silver hair and a bushy beard and wore tiny round reading glasses on the end of his nose. He was fond of wearing headgear such as pith helmets and sombreros during his sermons, and he had a habit of scribbling in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic on chalkboards set around him. When he wasn’t at the chalkboard, he tended to stare straight into the camera. Some people found his gaze unnerving, but others found it magnetic. In general, his tone was blunt. He often directed questions straight into the camera—questions like, for example, “Do you find me boring?” While preaching, he often swore. Occasionally, during homilies, he smoked cigars. On other occasions, he had nice-looking young women dance onstage while he preached. Later in his career, he was filmed for his television show preaching from the backseat of his Cadillac convertible, accompanied by some of those same young women dressed in bikinis. Scott was divorced and lived on an estate in Pasadena. He was something of a polymath. He played guitar, owned one of the largest private collections of Bibles in the world, and was a playwright. One of his plays, Jumpin’ at the Oval Office, was the story of an imagined jam session between Fats Waller and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a deft fund-raiser. He liked to exhort his listeners to donate to his church with declarations like “If you don’t send money, you should vomit on yourself with your head up in the air.” His technique seemed to be effective. On a preacher’s salary, he bought a private jet and a few horse ranches. When questioned about the appropriateness of his church raising so much money, Scott answered, “As far as I know, my ministry is not a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.”

  Someone at the library suggested that it would be great for Save the Books to have a fund-raising telethon like the one Jerry Lewis did for muscular dystrophy. Gene Scott, who was on the Save the Books committee, announced that he wanted to host the telethon in the church’s vast auditorium and act as the master of ceremonies. Some members of the committee found Gene Scott a bit outrageous, but they acknowledged that having him host would be a boon because of his enormous audience and persuasive personality. His participation was endorsed by Wyman Jones, who offered to demonstrate both of his extracurricular talents—jazz piano and magic—on the show.