The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  The city scrambled for funds for the book salvage and divided the contracts between Eric Lundquist’s company, Document Reprocessors, and a company called Airdex. The companies used different systems to achieve the same results. Document Reprocessors owned five vacuum chambers similar to the one at McDonnell Douglas that used intense vacuum pressure to remove the water through the process of sublimation. Lundquist estimated the chambers would draw off close to 250,000 pounds of water. Airdex, which was collaborating with NASA on the project, placed the books in a chamber that purged its internal atmosphere every twenty-five seconds, carrying away water vapor that evaporated from the books. Both of the systems took close to a week to dry a single book, depending on how wet it was. Book conservators estimated that the books’ water content ranged from ten percent to one hundred percent—that is, some of the books were equal amounts water and paper. Book conservators like to argue over whether vacuum drying is better than dehumidifying for wet books. Eric Lundquist stamped “DR” in the books he dried because he was convinced his system was better than Airdex, and he wanted to compare them when the project was finished. He dared me to find one of his books and compare it to one of Airdex’s. “Ours are flat,” he said. “They look like they never got wet.”

  Once a batch of books was dried, it was shipped across town to the chief conservator, Sally Buchanan, who directed her staff to run each book through a checklist, which included questions such as:

  Are the pages badly cockled?

  Is the textblock swollen? Is it distorted, out of “square”?

  Are the external joints and internal hinges strong?

  Is the spine intact?

  Are the endsheets solid?

  Will the text open and close flat?

  Buchanan told the library staff that it would take thirty-six months to rehabilitate the books and have them ready to be cataloged and returned to the shelves. “On the whole, the staff was pleased with what was salvageable,” Buchanan wrote to Wyman Jones and Elizabeth Teoman. “Many books look good, but these are clearly ones which did not become very wet, i.e., tide lines from water up only an inch or two from the bottom edge . . . There are, however, signs of very active mildew on covers of a number of books.” Buchanan said some books were hopeless. These were severely burned, or their pages were stuck together, or entire sections were missing; they were beyond hope.

  Restoring the Central Library collection was the largest book-drying project ever undertaken. Approximately 700,000 books—75,000 cubic feet of material—were wet or smoky or, in many cases, both. Up until the library, the largest book-drying project involved just 100,000 books. The pressure chambers chugged along for months. In the end, twenty percent of the books that made it through the drying process were in good enough condition to be shelved immediately. About thirty-five percent dried well but needed to have their bindings replaced. Seventy-five percent needed extensive cleaning or fumigating. All books with glossy paper, which became slick and sticky when wet, were completely ruined.

  On June 3, 1988—over twenty years after the Green Report suggested that the Goodhue Building be demolished—the restoration of the original building began, and ground was broken for the library’s new wing. Until the work was finished, the library operated out of temporary quarters on Spring Street. The location didn’t please anyone, but at least now that construction on Central finally was under way, it seemed tolerable for the time.

  The new wing Pfeiffer had designed complemented the Goodhue Building without pretending to be the same vintage. The city had purchased the lot south of the existing building for the wing, which would be joined to the Goodhue Building’s southern wall. Pfeiffer’s design centered on an eight-story atrium. Even though the addition was massive, it wouldn’t challenge the height of the original building, because four of its eight stories were belowground. Most subject departments would be relocated in the new wing. Book storage would no longer be in the stacks; it would be in an airy and sprinklered space in the new wing. Visitors to the library would travel up and down the eight stories of the atrium on a series of cascading escalators. The experience of passing through both buildings would be like walking through an eccentric playhouse and then tumbling over a waterfall.

  28.

  33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (2011)

  By Lynskey, Dorian

  784.491 L989

  Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games (2015)

  By Brooke-Hitching, Edward

  796.009 B872

  Passing Through: Groove-Oriented Chamber Music, Vol. 3 (2016)

  By Wolfgang, Gernot

  CD Classical Chamber

  Knitting Without Tears: Basic Techniques and Easy-to-Follow Directions for Garments to Fit All Sizes (1971)

  By Zimmermann, Elizabeth

  746.21 Z73

  There are a lot of surprising things in the library; a lot of things you don’t think of when you try to imagine all of what a library might contain. For instance, the Los Angeles library has a huge collection of restaurant menus. Librarians Dan Strall and Billie Connor started the collection, and an ophthalmologist from Palos Verdes, who collected menus since 1940, donated most of them. The ophthalmologist used his menus as a running diary of his dating life: He wrote a note on the back of many of them, recording which of his girlfriends accompanied him to the restaurant. Besides the menu collection, there are other unexpected things. In a group of boxes in the Art and Music Department stacks, you will find the costumes, props, and large terrifying marionettes from the Turnabout Theatre Company, an adult puppet theater that flourished in Los Angeles from 1941 to 1956. There are collections of bookplates and fruit crate labels and sheet music covers and movie posters and the largest gathering of materials on bullfighting in the United States and, of course, Lummis’s autographs. As soon as Xochitl Oliva, the senior librarian in charge of digitization, finishes cataloging them, the anti-war posters and pamphlets from the L.A. Resistance will join the library’s ephemera. There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

  One thing I hadn’t expected in the library was music. I knew there were books about music, as well as CDs and cassettes, but I didn’t know the collection includes sheets of music to be played. One afternoon, I was hanging out with Sheila Nash, the senior librarian in the Art and Music Department. So far, my visit to Art and Music had been what I’d expected—the department was silent, almost slumbery, filled with people tenderly flipping pages of oversize art books, or lined up at the desk asking where they could find books on cello theory or protest songs or recent copies of Bead & Button magazine. The definition of “art and music” is generous, encompassing crafts, sports, games, gardening, stamp collecting, and dance. Its wide reach became so baffling that the name was changed not long ago to Art, Music, and Recreation.

  Nash and her husband, Roy Stone, have worked for the Los Angeles library for a combined total of seventy-nine years. (Not long after I interviewed them, they both retired.) It was Nash’s purse that Glen Creason and Stone had been looking for immediately after the fire, when they discovered that the Patent Room had melted. Nash and Stone are library people. Besides being a senior librarian, Stone had been the head of the Librarians’ Guild for many years. He once confided to me that when he worked at a branch downtown, local drug dealers used to come to the library and ask him to help fill out their tax returns. He thought it was a perfect example of the rare role libraries play, to be a government entity, a place of knowledge, that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind.

  Nash was on the phone, helping someone who wanted to know what year Dizzy Dean was born. She mouthed “He could Goo
gle it” to me and pointed at the mouthpiece of the phone, shrugging. Her desk was a mad mix, piled with a few copies of Hollywood Reporter, a book on the homes of the American presidents, knitting instructions for little toys called Whimsical Woollies, a horse-racing magazine, a chess magazine, a recent copy of British Vogue.

  When she finished delivering Dizzy Dean’s birth date to the man on the phone, we headed back through the bookshelves and stopped beside a massive file cabinet. Nash pulled open one of the drawers of the file. Inside were dozens of orchestral scores, black notes prancing across eight staves. The department owns more than two thousand orchestral scores, and each one has the music for every instrument written into the piece. The scores are as thick as books. The library came into its first scores in 1934, when the founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, William Andrews Clark, Jr., willed his collection of 752 scores to the Music Department. The next batch was added in 1948, when the library bought an orchestral score rental library, and the collection has grown steadily since. The library also owns reams and reams of sheet music. The major donor of the sheet music was composer Meredith Willson, who donated his collection in the mid-1960s, soon after his play The Music Man was produced on Broadway and went on to be one of the most successful movies of 1962.

  Musical scores are expensive. They cost anywhere from three hundred to nine hundred dollars per score, and each musician in an orchestra needs his or her own. Having a score for each musician can be an insurmountable expense, especially for small orchestras. Los Angeles is home to dozens of orchestras and music groups, such as the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony Orchestra, the Balalaika Orchestra, the Orange County Guitar Orchestra, the Inner City Youth Orchestra—the list rolls on and on. Los Angeles has more working musicians than any city in the United States. It also has one of the few libraries in the country that loans out musical scores. The coexistence of these facts doesn’t seem like an accident.

  Nash monitors the borrowing and returning of the music and is also the keeper of secrets. The classical music world is small and competitive. The Desert Symphony doesn’t want the Armenian General Benevolent Union Orchestra to know what they plan to play for their winter season, and the Filipino American Orchestra doesn’t want the New Valley Symphony Orchestra to know its plans, but at the same time, they don’t want to end up all trying to sell tickets to the same program of Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem. Nash is the soul of discretion, and she will, with great subtlety, direct a chamber music group away from Igor Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet if she knows another chamber music group has just borrowed copies of it. She is also the soul of forbearance. Musicians appear to be incapable of remembering when their scores are due back at the library. Some of the music collection’s clients have racked up as much as twelve thousand dollars in overdue fines. “Well, they’re very artistic people,” Nash said, squaring up a stack of Rimsky-Korsakov scores. “They seem to have a way of misplacing things.”

  29.

  Manual of Procedures, Civil (1979)

  By Association of Municipal Court Clerks of California

  347.9 A849

  Nitroglycerine and Nitroglycerine Explosives (1928)

  By Naoúm, Phokion P.

  Series: World Wide Chemical Translation Series No. 1

  662.2 N194

  The Mystery of the Fiery Message (1983)

  By Farley, Carol

  X

  Odd Gods: New Religions & the Cult Controversy (2001)

  Edited by Lewis, James R.

  291.0973 O225

  On June 8, 1988, the City of Los Angeles, represented by Victoria Chaney, deposed Harry Peak in the matter of Superior Court Case No. 672658, which combined Harry’s suit against the city with the city’s suit against him. Justice Chaney spoke to me recently about the case. She said that, despite the ferocity of the city’s claims against him, she found Harry very likable. When she met him, he was young and good-looking. There was something about him that seemed almost innocent; he wasn’t worldly or hardened at all. But she also found him a little tragic. “He struck me as lost,” she said as we sat in her office in the Federal Courthouse. “He had a sad childhood. He drifted from job to job. He seemed like he was looking quite desperately for something.” She said she didn’t trust the Reverend Smith, who often accompanied him, dressed in his black cassock, wearing a jeweled crucifix. She knew a little bit about Smith, how he attracted forlorn men to his homemade religion. She assumed he had become something of a father figure to Harry.

  In the new round of depositions, Harry’s testimony began adhering to a single time line different from the one he’d claimed when facing criminal charges. Harry now insisted what he’d said in the past about sightseeing downtown and delivering papers was not true. He said he’d spent the early morning of April 29 at home with his roommates. At ten A.M., he drove to Reverend Wilkie’s office to get his wart treated. The treatment lasted close to an hour, and then he and Reverends Wilkie and Smith had lunch. As their waiter was clearing the table, he mentioned the library was burning. This was the first Harry had heard of it. He said that his statements about the fire later that night were jokes he’d told to amuse his friends. He said he’d made up everything he said about the fire—about having helped an old lady, about being carried out by a handsome fireman. “I was the center of attention of my friends, who believed me at the time,” he testified, explaining why he’d claimed he started the fire. He said his only crime was naïveté, saying, “I did not imagine that I would get arrested as a result of this story.”

  Chaney next deposed Reverend Wilkie. After being sworn in, the reverend stated that his profession was podiatry, and that, along with Father Clark, he ran the American Orthodox Church, which was a small independent congregation. Father Clark helped Father Wilkie run his podiatry office and also worked as his driver, because Father Wilkie was in poor health and wasn’t permitted to drive. Wilkie said he’d first met Harry Peak in 1984, when Harry had come to him for wart treatment, and he now considered Harry a friend.

  Chaney asked Wilkie for more details about the day of the fire. He answered with essentially the same litany as Harry’s: He saw Harry around ten, and they had a bite to eat after Harry’s wart treatment. Suddenly, Wilkie keeled forward. Chaney stopped her questioning. “Excuse me, Father. Are you in pain?” she asked. “I notice that you’re holding your chest.”

  Wilkie clutched his chest and then said in a halting voice, “Yes, a little bit.” He paused for another moment and then said, “I took nitroglycerin a minute ago . . . five minutes ago . . . something. It helped. I’m . . . I’m . . . I would like to finish, please.” Chaney asked if he needed a recess, and he shook his head and said he didn’t want to take a break, because he was afraid he would fall asleep for hours if he rested. “Let’s try . . . let’s try to endure, please,” he said, and then, collecting himself, gave more details of the lunch at the French Quarter. He said the waiter had told the men that the library had been “set on fire.” When I read the deposition, those three words stuck out. At the point the waiter told them about the fire, no news source had yet described it as having been “set.” At that time, the fire was still raging, and the news about it centered on the question of whether or not the library could be saved.

  The city laid out its arguments about why it believed Harry Peak was responsible for the fire: His alibis were inconsistent. Several people identified him in a photo lineup. There were “triable issues of material fact” that pointed to his guilt. Once again, Chaney itemized what the fire cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles: $625,000 for sawdust and salvage sheets used to suppress the fire and protect books. Three million gallons of water, “exact cost to be ascertained.” The cost of replacing or repairing more than one million books. Repair costs for damage to the building. Medical expenses for the injured firefighters. Central to the city’s case was the assumption that the fire had an “unnatural” cause. Whether or not the fire was arson was never debated; investigators declared it arson, and thei
r assessment was accepted as fact. As Chaney put it, the investigators “eliminated all accidental, natural, and/or mechanical sources of ignition . . . In other words, the fire started from an open flame, held in a human hand.”

  The case of the Central Library fire confounded me. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t completely convince myself that Harry started the fire. He does fit the usual profile of an arsonist, which is a young single white male. But most arsonists who suffer from a psychological impulse to burn things begin displaying their compulsions in childhood. As far as I knew, and as far as any records indicate, Harry had never started a fire. He applied for a job at the fire department—or so he said—and perhaps he had more interest in fire than anyone realized. But lots of people apply to work in the fire department, and the vast majority of them are not pyromaniacs. Even though Harry only talked about being an actor, his interest in being a firefighter made a certain kind of sense. It was dramatic; it was heroic; it had status. His father’s remark that he could imagine Harry burning a vacant building seemed just a clumsy way of saying that he considered Harry impulsive, capable of doing something irresponsible to a building of no importance, but not someone who would want to damage a beautiful, important building that was full of life.