by Susan Orlean
After getting positive responses to Harry’s driver’s license photograph, the arson team was certain he’d started the fire. In a fifteen-point memo, they detailed their reasoning. They cited the inconsistencies in his various alibis; his changed appearance; the selection of his photo by the library staff; and the fact that he’d failed the polygraph test. Also, he possessed firsthand knowledge of some of the day’s events that he couldn’t have known unless he had been there. For instance, he mentioned several times that he’d bumped into a woman. No news reports mentioned this incident, but it did occur—the woman and the guard on duty both confirmed it. It would have been impossible for Harry to know about the incident if he hadn’t been present when she fell.
The investigators laid out their final comprehensive theory, including a motive. They believed Harry went to the library twice that day. He first arrived around seven thirty A.M., and the guard turned him away because the building wasn’t open to the public. Then he returned around ten A.M., when the library was open, and he stayed for about an hour, which was when library staff noticed the suspicious blond man in inappropriate locations on the second floor. Investigators believed he started the fire because he was angry that the guard grabbed his arm and prevented him from going into the building earlier. He came back to burn the building down for revenge.
Harry Peak was arrested at his house on a probable-cause warrant late Friday afternoon, February 27, 1987, and taken to the jail in Hollywood for questioning. He was upset, shaken, tearful. Despite the scrutiny he’d been subjected to over the previous several months, he seemed incapable of imagining that he was a real suspect and might be subject to a real arrest.
His arrest on Friday afternoon was intentional: That was normally a dead zone for news, and the prosecutors wanted to attract as little attention as possible in the hope that Harry would confess before they had to bring formal charges, perhaps even before he obtained a lawyer. He could be held in custody for seventy-two hours. After that he had to be either formally indicted or released. Investigators were hoping for him to confess because, in truth, their case was only circumstantial. There was no physical evidence or definitive proof that Harry had been in the library at all, let alone started the fire. Bail was set at $250,000, which investigators knew he would find difficult to raise.
The quiet around his arrest didn’t last long. First, Mayor Tom Bradley issued a statement of congratulations to the fire department—something that seems unwisely premature, since Harry had not been formally charged, and Bradley probably knew the case against him was jerry-built at best. On top of that, two people in the fire department discussed the arrest on an unsecured radio channel that local papers monitored for tips. The story broke immediately. The Los Angeles Times, describing Harry as a part-time actor and “errand boy,” published with the headline FRIENDS SAY TALL TALES TRAPPED ARSON SUSPECT. Reverend Clark Smith, the last of Harry’s alibis and the one he seemed to be sticking to most adamantly, provided a pallid defense of his friend: He told the Times that Harry didn’t look very much like the police artist’s sketch of the suspect, especially since he couldn’t have grown a mustache if his life depended on it. Whether Harry resembled the sketch is a matter of opinion, but Harry’s ability to grow a mustache is a matter of fact. I recently borrowed several pictures of Harry from Demitri Hioteles, and Harry has a thick mustache in most of them.
What Reverend Smith didn’t mention was that Harry couldn’t have started the fire because he was sitting with him at the French Quarter. Smith only provided a version of the convoluted logic that made Harry’s endless helix of confessions and denials so maddening: He said that everyone who knew Harry had laughed when investigators said he gave conflicting accounts of his whereabouts. You had to know Harry, Reverend Smith told the reporter, adding, “Harry always gives conflicting stories.”
22.
Human Information Retrieval (2010)
By Warner, Julian
010.78 W282
Food Safety Homemakers’ Attitudes and Practices [microform] (1977)
By Jones, Judith Lea
NH 614.3 J77
Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (2006)
By Harris, Bob
809.2954 J54Ha
A New Owner’s Guide to Maltese (1997)
By Abbott, Vicki
636.765 M261Ab
The opposite of a sensory-deprivation tank might be to spend a Monday morning in the library’s InfoNow Department. The phone rings with that weird blooping electronic tone all day long, and the staff of five reference librarians answer, ping-ponging from topic to topic so widely that just sitting among them and listening makes your brain feel rubbery.
“Monday mornings are busy,” said Rolando Pasquinelli, the supervisor of the department. “Excuse me, hang on.” He pushed a button on his phone and said, “Hello, InfoNow, can I help you?”
“I wanted to be a librarian since I was five years old,” said one of the staff librarians, Tina Princenthal. “Hang on. InfoNow, can I help? Okay, okay . . . Did you say ‘What’s a cabana boy?’ ”
“We get a lot of repeat callers,” said David Brenner, who was at the desk next to Princenthal’s. “We have an older gentleman who calls regularly with questions about mythology, science fiction, World War I, that sort of thing. He also always asks about a few actresses and celebrities, asking me if I know what’s going on with them. Actually, he asks about Juliette Lewis and the women in Pussy Riot.”
The librarian beside Brenner, Harry Noles, said, “Oh, and there’s that guy who calls every few months to get updates on Dana Delany, the actress from that show China Beach.”
Princenthal hung up her phone and wrote something down. “Sometimes I’m amazed by what people call about,” she said, tapping her desk with a pencil. “Once, a patron called to ask if it was okay for her to eat a can of beans that didn’t have an expiration date. I mean, there is a website called Still Tasty that I use to check expiration dates on things, but I’m not going to take responsibility for a lady eating a can of beans!”
I said they all seemed to know a lot.
“I tried out for Jeopardy!,” Brenner said.
“I tried out and passed the test,” Noles said.
“It was my first week of work!” Princenthal went on, still thinking about beans. “I told her what the average shelf life of beans was, but I’m hoping she didn’t eat them.”
“Yes, all branches are open today,” Brenner said into his phone.
“Hello, yes, library cards expire every three years,” Noles said into his phone, teasing the curly phone cord and letting it snap back.
“Last week a lady called and asked me how to sign a card for a baby shower,” Princenthal said. “I mean, that’s not exactly something to look up. I just said, ‘How about . . . “Best wishes”? Or . . . “Congratulations”?’ Just off the top of my head. I didn’t consult any source. She seemed happy with that answer.” She then added, “There are a lot of lonely people out there.”
“We handle things in the department if possible,” Pasquinelli said. He has been a librarian at Central for thirty-five years. His desk was a medium-size mountain range of papers and books and files and booklets. “We will refer things along if we have to. If someone calls and says, ‘I want to know when Marilyn Monroe died,’ we can do that here in the department, boom! But if they ask whether her death was a suicide, we send them to the Literature Department.”
Princenthal hung up her phone and shook her head. “Why would someone call here and ask, ‘Which is more evil, grasshoppers or crickets?’ ” she said to no one in particular. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
The phones stopped for a moment. The air vibrated. The phones started again.
“InfoNow . . . sure . . . okay, so I assume it’s a British book?” Princenthal said. “Oh, the hockey team Kings. Not British kings.” She typed something into her computer. “Yes, several books in Sports. That’s in Art and Recreation.”
; “I swear some people have us on speed dial,” Brenner said, hanging up his call. “This woman—we call her ‘Fur’—she calls for spelling and grammar help all the time. She says she’s a poet. Sometimes she will call twenty-five times in an hour with editing questions.”
“Not everyone has the Internet or knows how to use it,” Noles said. “Hello, InfoNow?” Pause. “Say the title again? Life-Changing Magic of Cleaning Up? Oh, Tidying Up. I’ll check. Just a moment.”
“You’re getting an error message on your e-media download?” Pasquinelli asked into his phone. “Hold on a moment.”
“We get a lot of obituary questions,” Noles said to me, “and a lot of etiquette questions. And actually, a lot of etiquette-in-obituaries questions. Hello, InfoNow, can I help you . . . Uh-huh. Sure. Can you spell that? C-e-l-e-s-t-e, last name the letter N, the letter G? Just N-g? Okay, just a moment.”
“Are you saying Dylan is the author’s first name or last name?” Brenner said, looking at his computer screen. “Okay, great. Just a moment, I’ll get that for you.”
“My friends think because I’m a librarian, I know everything,” Princenthal said to me. “We’ll be watching the Olympics, and suddenly, they’ll say, ‘Tina, how do they score snowboarding at the Olympics?’ Or out of the blue, ‘Tina, how long do parrots live?’ ”
“Is the name of the book The New Owner’s Guide to Maltese?” Noles asked, leaning toward his computer screen. He listened to the caller for a minute. “So are you saying you are a new owner looking for a guide to Maltese dogs?” Pause. With the phone tucked under his chin, he typed a few words. He read what popped up on his screen and smiled. “Okay, you’re in luck,” he told the caller. “We have both.”
23.
Unionization: The Viewpoint of Librarians (1975)
By Guyton, Theodore Lewis
331.881102 G992
Parking 1956: Inventory of Off Street Parking, Downtown Los Angeles (1956)
388.3794 P2475-9
Richard Neutra: Mit Einem Essay von Dion Neutra, Erinnerungen an meine Zeit mit Richard Neutra (1992)
By Sack, Manfred
G 720.934 N497Sa
California’s Deadliest Earthquakes: A History (2017)
By Hoffman, Abraham
551.2209794 H699
The tug-of-war over whether to renovate or replace the Goodhue Building went on for almost fifteen years. It included failed bond issues and feasibility reports and task forces; multiple proposals, such as one that suggested getting rid of a main library and just having branches; study groups; petitions; public hearings; and then more public hearings. Years were spent following the guidance of Charles Luckman, a controversial architect who was hired by the city to present a plan; he recommended developing a new building, and then recommended himself as the architect. One of the sharpest battles running parallel to the redevelopment debate involved parking at Central Library. There were only a few parking spots right near the library. Most staff members parked several blocks away and walked through downtown neighborhoods that felt perilous. The librarians began to agitate for some accommodation. What they proposed was paving the library’s West Lawn and garden for staff parking.
Los Angeles’s librarians—and most librarians around the country—are well organized, vocal, and opinionated. They unionized as the Librarians’ Guild in 1967 and joined the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in 1968. Many of the librarians I met had political or social service backgrounds and activist bents. I met several librarians who’d planned to join the Peace Corps but ended up in library school. One had expected to become a forest ranger but then became attracted to books. One librarian, writing in the union newsletter, referred to herself as a “librarian-priestess” and her employment contract as “her vows.”
The librarians at Central considered themselves more than colleagues. As much as the idea of a work family can seem a little hackneyed, the library really does feel like one, with all that implies in terms of familiarity and fondness and gossip and conflict and longevity. The staff is generally united on the opinion that administration (usually) and the Board of Library Commissioners (almost always) fail to understand what it is like to be working in the stacks, dealing with patrons, day in and day out. There is special disdain for any city librarian who never worked on the floor, shelving books and handling patrons. When John Szabo was hired, a number of librarians reacted with pleasure to the discovery that Szabo had worked every position in the library, starting at the checkout desk, saying things like “He’s a real library person,” as distinguished from someone who is just a manager, with no real feel for the place.
The staff channeled opinions via the Librarians’ Guild, which had a knack for coming up with lively demonstrations of those opinions. The Guild has organized sickouts and walkouts and protests over dismissals based on “insubordination.” Once, the Guild released a live turkey at a Board of Library Commissioners meeting to illustrate its opinion of a budget-cut proposal. In February 1969, the parking problem was boiling. The librarians staged a sickout in support of the plan to pave the garden. The garden was integral to Goodhue’s design, and Barton Phelps’s group of architectural historians was committed to preserving it. But the staff’s discontent was formidable, and while the larger issue of what to do with the library was stalled, it began to look like the staff was going to get a parking lot.
Architect Robert Alexander, who was the business partner of celebrated California architect Richard Neutra, decided to protest the proposed destruction of the garden. He chained himself to a rock near the Well of the Scribes and said he would stay there until the paving plan was abandoned. Barton Phelps and Margaret Bach’s group filed a motion to preserve the garden, but it was overruled. As a final effort, the team suggested an alternative of placing expanded parking on an adjacent lot. According to Barton Phelps, the Board of Library Commissioners never even responded to the suggestion. The librarians’ insistence won out, and the new parking lot was approved. Robert Alexander unchained himself from his rock, and within weeks, the West Lawn and garden were stripped of their fixtures and sculptures and fountains and plantings and were covered by a layer of blacktop. No one seems to know what happened to many of the garden sculptures once they were removed. The most significant one, the Well of the Scribes—Goodhue’s monument to the great writers of history—is still missing. Over the years, several significant sculptures from the garden have been spotted in private homes. Other pieces were stashed in damp corners of the library’s basement. Many are simply unaccounted for.
Not long after the garden was paved, City Librarian Hamill announced that he was retiring from his post and returning to academia. A national search was launched, and Wyman Jones was hired. He inherited a building with endless woes and no consensus on how to heal it. As a librarian, Jones was known as a builder rather than a programmer. He was even more eager than Hamill to bulldoze the Goodhue Building. But the plan to do so hit a snag when the Municipal Arts Commission announced that the library and its grounds were being designated as a work of art. Not long after that, the library was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The following winter, in 1971, the Los Angeles basin was bucked and broken, courtesy of the Sylmar Earthquake, which registered 6.7 on the Richter scale. The earthquake killed sixty-four people and cracked everything around it, from freeway overpasses to the Lower Van Norman Dam to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sylmar. The aftershock pulsed under the library, giving it a hard shake. More than a hundred thousand books bounced off their shelves. Reshelving the books was so much work that the city put out an appeal for volunteers to help the library staff. The mayor requested emergency funds from Governor Ronald Reagan and President Richard Nixon to help restore Central Library and to renovate two branch libraries that were so badly damaged that they closed. That same year, the Los Angeles library system turned one hundred years old.
24.
Babushka v seti [Grandma on the Inter
net] (2012)
By Shuliaeva, Natal’ia
Ru 510.78 S562
The Honest Life: Living Naturally and True to You (2013)
By Alba, Jessica
613 A325
Daily Activity Patterns of the Homeless: A Review (1988)
By Reich, Shayne
362.509794 R347
Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Eternal First Lady (2006)
By Li, Laura Tyson
92 C5325Li
In 1871, a visitor to the Los Angeles Public Library published an essay imagining a future in which the library would be miraculously compressed into an object the size of a suitcase. Considering how physical, how insistently tangible, libraries are—their pounds of pages and bindings, the mass and fleshy bulk of books—such a notion must have seemed as preposterous as landing on Mars. Of course, with the invention of the computer and the Internet, that is exactly what has happened. The library has a large amount of material that isn’t online, but the notion of much of it being pocket-size and contained in a small plastic box has been true for some time. Libraries saw the Internet coming and extended a hand. First they set up computer stations for public use; then they offered free Wi-Fi. Now at Central Library and many other libraries around the country, there are kiosks where anyone can borrow a laptop or tablet computer to use for the day, just the way she might borrow a book.
The Computer Center at Central Library is a large, long room with a line of utilitarian workstations and fifty-five desktop computers. It has a plain, workaday look, and all of the computers are in use almost all of the time. From the looks of it, if you didn’t know you were in a library, you might think you were in one of those telemarketing call centers. Many of the people waiting to enter the library at ten A.M. every day head straight for the Computer Center, jostling each other as they pass through the lobby and down the escalators. As soon as the fifty-five computer spots fill up, there is a waiting list and a lot of grumbling. Aside from the grumbling, most of the patrons at least murmur “Good morning” to the librarian on duty as they walk in—even patrons who seem barely verbal or too damaged to care about social niceties like a morning greeting. Viola Castro, one of the librarians on duty when I was there not long ago, said of the patrons, “They do try to be very nice.” Castro, a composed, square-shouldered African American woman, was dressed in smart clothes and looked like she worked in a bank. The other librarian on duty, Yael Gillette, had an open, cheerful face perforated here and there by piercings that wiggled a little when she spoke.
