by Susan Orlean
I called Bieber right after I read his email and asked him to walk me through his thoughts again. We talked about the fire for a long time, and he explained what he made of the case. He attributed Harry’s confessions and clumsy alibis to quirks in his personality compounded by the fact that people under pressure often give false confessions and misstatements. If the fire department had provided any significant evidence, Bieber said, the district attorney certainly would have charged Harry. The city’s refusal confirms that the fire department had only guesses and suppositions and a suspect who was a perfect target—someone intoxicated by attention. There was no malice or a desire to harm Harry, Bieber said, just a series of wrong assumptions and someone who was easy to blame. “At the end of the day, they’re cops, and cops like to arrest people,” Bieber said. “That’s just the way it is.”
As we were about to hang up, Bieber said one more thing: “In my opinion, it sounds like they got the wrong guy.” He took a deep breath and added, “It also sounds to me like there isn’t a guy to get.”
30.
The Library of Tomorrow: A Symposium (1939)
By Danton, Emily Miller
020.4 D194
The Future of Library Service: Demographic Aspects and Implications (1962)
By Schick, Frank Leopold
027.073 S331
Libraries for the Future: The Los Angeles Public Library’s Branch Facilities Master Plan (1985)
By Los Angeles Public Library
027.47949 L881Lo-4
BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (2015)
By Palfrey, John G.
025.018 P159
In late winter, I spent a day with Eva Mitnick, the head of Central Library. The day I chose happened to be one of her last days in the job, because she’d just been chosen to head the new division of Engagement and Learning, which Mitnick called her dream job. The new division will handle the ways the library makes connections with the public, including its volunteer programs and summer reading and all services directed at new immigrants. Los Angeles is one of the first libraries to create this kind of service. Since it launched in 2016, many libraries around the country have modeled departments after it.
Mitnick is gangly but somehow manages to appear elfin, with a fine-featured face and dewy eyes. She has librarian blood. Her mother, Virginia Walter, worked for the Los Angeles library system for decades. When Virginia had to work a Saturday shift, she often brought Eva with her, so Eva grew up roaming the stacks and playing peekaboo at the checkout desk. Mitnick refers to herself as a “library brat” and says that many of the other brats she knew when growing up have ended up becoming librarians, too—and many of them are in the Los Angeles system. There weren’t many moments in her life when Mitnick wasn’t spending time in the library. After those Saturdays as a toddler tagalong, she started working here in 1987, when she was still in library school.
The day I arranged to spend with Mitnick was exceptional by Los Angeles standards, gray and rainy and dank. The rain didn’t sprinkle down—it thumped, the nickel-size drops bouncing on the sidewalk, the kind of gushing drench you might get if you were wringing out a wet towel. As I drove to the library, I slalomed around garbage cans that had toppled over and were shooting down the hilly streets or were wedged against a curb or a parked car, their big blocky bodies damming the water and creating a foamy flume. I knew the library would be busy; whenever the weather is bad, people who live on the streets gravitate to the comfort of the reading rooms.
Mitnick was in her office when I arrived, nibbling on a dry-looking sandwich and staring at a webinar on her computer screen called “Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries.” More than one hundred other librarians around the country were logged on to the webinar, probably chewing on their own dry sandwiches. Mitnick had the volume turned down and was scribbling notes between bites. Running Central Library had been a change for her. She’d spent most of her first twenty-eight library years in various children’s departments as a hands-on librarian rather than a manager. She recently returned to her roots in the Children’s Department: In addition to running Central, she was now filling in as head of Teen’Scape and Children, because budget cuts and subsequent staff shrinkage had obliged the remaining librarians to double up on responsibilities. As the webinar continued, Mitnick pulled out a calendar and reviewed her schedule for the day, which included many events that were outreach-directed rather than book-directed. She started the day at nine A.M., meeting with Department of Health staff who were advising librarians from around the city on the harsher facts of having some of the city’s estimated forty-five thousand homeless people among their clientele—facts like how to spot bedbugs and lice, and how to detect signs of tuberculosis. During that meeting, Mitnick ducked out for a minute to listen in on a seminar in the next room where librarians were being trained how to teach computer coding to children. She then dashed down the hall to check on a group of caterers who were arranging plates and glasses in the courtyard beside the Mark Taper Auditorium. Today at noon, the first class of Career Online High School was graduating, and the students and their families were invited for a celebratory lunch after the ceremony.
As soon as the webinar and her sandwich were finished, Mitnick and I went downstairs to a room just off the main lobby of the library. A line of people was winding from the door of the room all the way into the lobby and almost reached the checkout desks. Mitnick explained that this was a trial run of The Source—the gathering at the library of social service agencies from around the city that John Szabo had described when I spent the day with him. Mitnick and Szabo believed the advantage of The Source was that people could sign up for all the services they needed in the space of one large meeting room instead of traipsing from veterans’ services in one building and food stamps in another and housing assistance in yet another. If all went well, Szabo and Mitnick wanted to host The Source at the library on a regular basis. Mitnick had noticed recently that people seemed to really like gathering at the library for things besides checking out books. She saw great turnouts for discussion groups and movie screenings, and recently, about two thousand people had shown up for a Maker Faire, a gathering of tech enthusiasts, tinkerers, and crafters.
The doors for The Source weren’t open yet, but the long line seemed like a hearty endorsement. “Yes!” Mitnick said, pumping her fists. “I knew it! Everyone’s here!” While she is a full-throated supporter of the library’s role in social services, she has her limits. She told me that one of her greatest achievements as head of Central was eliminating what she called “the cubicles of sin”—the individual work carrels in each department that provided privacy for the users. The problem was that some people construed the highest use of privacy to be sex or drugs. “All sorts of terrible things were happening,” Mitnick said. “And I just decided there was no reason to keep the cubicles. No one needs a private workspace in the library. And so they’re gone.”
Caseworkers from the social service agencies, food banks, and mental health organizations set up plastic tables in a big U-shape, so people would be able to move from one to the other, the way they would navigate a buffet line. Mitnick and I found seats next to a pierced and ponytailed caseworker from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. He introduced himself as Hector. He lined up approximately forty ballpoint pens on the table next to a notebook swollen with intake forms.
“We’re doing this,” Hector said to Mitnick, smiling and tapping his notebook for punctuation. “This is really”—tap tap—“awesome!”
Once the room was ready, Mitnick motioned to Stan Molden, the security guard, who had held the line back as The Source was setting up. Molden nodded and stepped aside. The line bulged at the door and then began snaking around the room. I glanced over at Mitnick, who was smiling as she watched the line of people move in. “See?” she said, sounding excited. “See?”
There were so many people coming in, so eager for information, tha
t I was pressed into service as a temporary intake worker. My job was to write down people’s names and ask them basic questions about themselves and the benefits they were seeking. I was nervous. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but I have always been scared of homeless people or, rather, scared of the air of menacing unpredictability I perceive around them. That feeling had deepened when a homeless woman slugged me in the chest as we passed each other in a crosswalk in New York some years ago. But the people moving from table to table were quiet and personable and patient despite the glacial progress of the line. Some were tidy, and others were in ruins of clothing that was so soiled it had taken on the sheen of leather. A woman with queenly bearing, carrying a tote bag the size of an orange crate, was my first intake. “I’m homeless,” she said after telling me her name. “I might need a bus pass.” She rummaged around in her bag and glanced up. She studied me and then beamed, saying, “Well, aren’t you so pretty with your eyes and your hair!” She turned to the man behind her, who was in a battered wheelchair, accompanied by a grizzled dog wearing a service-animal vest. The dog looked bored. “Just take a look at her, Willis,” she said to the man in the wheelchair, gesturing for him to look at me.
I finished registering them, sorry to have them move on. My next client was a good-looking man with silky dark skin. He was wearing a crewneck sweater and slacks; he looked as immaculate as a dentist. He told me his name was David, and then I asked him the standard intake questions. The first was about current employment. One of the multiple-choice answers was “retired,” which he found hilarious. Once he stopped laughing, he said, “I don’t think ‘retirement’ would describe my situation. I’m not working. I do things. I sing in a barbershop quartet, which gives me satisfaction but no income.” I asked the next question, “What is your immediate need?” and he replied, “My immediate need is for food.”
He started laughing again and it was wonderful to hear, because he had a deep, rich, rounded voice—a movie star’s voice, a narrator’s voice. I asked if he had ever done voiceover work, and he said other people had suggested it to him, but he’d never pursued it and wasn’t sure how. His appearance was so discordant with his situation that I continued talking to him, hoping he would tell me something about himself. He said he used to have a job and a house and even owned a second house as a rental property, but he had made what he described as “very bad financial decisions” and, one by one, lost all that he had. For the last five months, he’d been living in his car. The one part of his former life he clung to was a gym membership, so he could go somewhere to shower and shave. “I don’t want to let myself go,” he said. “I need to keep myself up.”
The line was bunching up behind David, so we had to stop talking. Before he went to the next table, I recorded him on my phone saying a greeting and then a brief description of the weather. Between my next few intakes, I emailed the recording to a friend who sent it to people who hire voiceover actors. I suppose it was foolish to be so hopeful, but being in that room made me feel like anything was possible—that the unfathomable problem of homelessness could be solved, that a community of people with a common purpose could be drawn together and make everything work out. I fantasized that lightning would strike and that David would get hired for a great narration job on the strength of the phone recording, and everything that had gone wrong for him would go right. All the people who received the recording agreed that David’s voice was magical, but none of them was hiring at the moment. They said they would keep him in mind. After I finished my shift at The Source, I never saw him again.
Mitnick and I talked about the future of libraries. She is an idealist. She thinks libraries are adapting to the world as it is now, where knowledge streams around us as well as being captured in physical books. Like Szabo and many other library people who are eager for innovation, Mitnick sees libraries as information and knowledge centers rather than simply as storehouses of material. She is one of a large cohort of library people who believe that libraries will remain essential to their communities. By most measures, this optimistic cohort seems to be right. According to a 2010 study, almost three hundred million Americans used one of the country’s 17,078 public libraries and bookmobiles in the course of the year. In another study, over ninety percent of those surveyed said closing their local library would hurt their communities. Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald’s; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one. In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books.
Libraries are old-fashioned, but they are growing more popular with people under thirty. This younger generation uses libraries in greater numbers than older Americans do, and even though they grew up in a streaming, digital world, almost two thirds of them believe that there is important material in libraries that is not available on the Internet. Unlike older generations, people under thirty are also less likely to have office jobs. Consequently, they are always looking for pleasant places to work outside their homes. Many end up in coffee shops and hotel lobbies or join the booming business of coworking spaces. Some of them are also discovering that libraries are society’s original coworking spaces and have the distinct advantage of being free.
Humankind persists in having the desire to create public places where books and ideas are shared. In 1949, UNESCO published a Public Library Manifesto to establish the importance of libraries on the United Nations agenda. The manifesto states, “The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.”
Even when it is impossible to establish libraries in permanent quarters, people want them, and librarians have accommodated. The first recorded instance of a bookmobile was in 1905, when a horse-drawn library wagon traveled around Washington County, Maryland, loaning books. The idea of bringing libraries to patrons caught on, and many libraries introduced book wagons modeled on the Maryland one. The earliest ones focused on delivering books to lumberjacks, miners, and other workers far from a town library. In 1936, the Works Progress Administration established a Pack Horse Librarians unit to serve the mountain communities in Kentucky. Until the WPA lost its funding in 1943, this group of sturdy horsewoman librarians rode from village to village, delivering more than thirty-five hundred books and eight thousand magazines monthly.
In 1956, the federal Library Services Act funded almost three hundred bookmobiles to serve rural communities. These days, many public libraries have bookmobiles to serve areas of their cities that don’t have branch libraries. The Los Angeles Public Library system doesn’t have a bookmobile right now, but it has three book bikes that are dispatched to different neighborhoods around the city, carrying a saddlebag’s portion of books. There are also private bookmobiles, such as Florida-based Bess the Book Bus, serving as mobile literacy programs. Sixty thousand Little Free Libraries, in eighty countries around the world, offer book exchanges—take one, give one—housed in wooden cabinets about twice the size of a birdhouse. They are part of the nonprofit Little Free Libraries Organization, but they are set up and run by any individual who is willing to put one of the cabinets in her front yard and fill it with giveaway books.
Four of the Pack Horse Librarians ready for the day’s work
The Biblioburro mobile library in Colombia
Worldwide, there are 320,000 public libraries serving hundreds of millions of people in every country on the planet. A large number of these libraries are in conventional buildings. Others are mobile and, depending on the location’s terrain and weather, operate by bicycle, backpack, helicopter, boat, train, motorcycle, ox, donkey, elephant, camel, truck, bus, or horse. In Zambia, a four-ton truck of books travels a regular route through rural areas. In Cajamarca Province, Peru, there is no library building, so seven hundred farmers make space in their homes, each one housing a section of the town library. In Beijing, about a third of library books are borrowed out of vending
machines around the city. In Bangkok, a train filled with books, called the Library Train for Young People, serves homeless children, who often live in encampments near train stations. In Norway, villages in the fjords without libraries are served by a book boat that makes stops along the coast of Hordaland, Møre og Romsdal, and Sogn og Fjordane counties all winter, distributing literature. Sweden has a book boat, too, and so do Finland, Canada, and Venezuela. Some mobile libraries focus on special communities and bring them material unique to their culture. Norway has a bookmobile that brings material in the Sami language to the nomadic Sami reindeer herders in the far north.
Animals power many of the mobile libraries around the world. Donkeys and mules are the most common library creatures. In the Magdalena Department of Colombia, a schoolteacher named Luís Soriano was worried that residents of the small villages in his province didn’t have access to libraries, so he set up his own donkey-powered Biblioburro. On weekends, he rides one donkey, Alfa, and leads another, Beto, outfitted with saddlebags of books. After he crosses the province over the course of a month, Soriano heads back in the other direction to pick up returns. In the Nkayi District in northwestern Zimbabwe, donkey-drawn electro-communication library carts travel to remote villages with books and printed material as well as a radio, a telephone, a fax, and public access to the Internet. Kenya has a camel library that delivers books to nomadic villages in the regions of Garissa and Wajir. Sometimes the camels sit down when the villagers come to collect their reading material, their rough-furred bodies forming a kind of living berm separating the special space of the library from the wide-open fields.
