"The Library Book"

Public libraries is my happy place, so Susan Orlean's new book panders almost too much to this reader.

• In one of the carrels in History, a man in a pin-striped suit who had books on his desk but wasn’t reading held a bag of Doritos under the lip of the table. He pretended to muffle a cough each time he ate a chip.
• I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I’d visited.
• On those visits, I had been to and from the beach, and up and down the canyons, and in and out of the valley, and back and forth to the mountains, but I never gave downtown Los Angeles a second thought,
• The sense of gentle, steady busyness, like water on a rolling boil, was just the same.
• It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. ... It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.
• The rotunda is one of those rare places that have a kind of sacred atmosphere, full of a quiet so dense and deep that it almost feels underwater... I was so stirred by the library’s beauty that when Brecher arrived to give me my tour, I was chattering like someone on a successful first date.
• It housed the largest collection of books on food and cooking in the country—twelve thousand volumes, which included three hundred on French cuisine, thirty on cooking with oranges and lemons, and six guides to cooking with insects, including the classic Butterflies in My Stomach.
• At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring on the updraft.
• A stoichiometric condition is almost impossible to create outside of a laboratory. It requires such an elusive, precise balance of fuel and fire and oxygen that, in a sense, it is more theoretical than actual. .. Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy.
• a flashover, a dreaded situation during a fire in which everything in a closed space—even smoke—becomes so hot that it reaches the point of spontaneous ignition, causing a complete and consuming eruption of fire from every surface.
• It had required 1,400 bottles of oxygen; 13,440 square feet of salvage covers; two acres of plastic sheeting; ninety bales of sawdust; more than three million gallons of water; and the majority of the city of Los Angeles’s firefighting personnel and equipment, but the library fire was at last declared extinguished,
• The ash was ankle-deep. The melted shelving looked grotesque. Wyman Jones declared that the interior of the library looked “like an el cheapo movie set, done by scab special-effects men.”
• Olivia Primanis, the book conservator, told Wyman Jones that they had to move quickly and freeze the books because mold spores begin to bloom within forty-eight hours after being activated by water.
• Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, diligently and peacefully. They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.
• During the week, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl dominated every newspaper around the world except for Pravda, which covered it briefly but managed to find ample room to report on the fire at Central Library.
• It was in the chemical makeup of Los Angeles; possibility was an element, like oxygen.
• I love Los Angeles; I even loved its preening, grabby, ambitious silliness, its Harry-ness, because it pulsed with emotion and wishfulness and ripe brokenheartedness, animated in the most naked way.
• As soon as it was over, I felt like I’d just jumped out of an airplane, which is perhaps the natural reaction to doing something I’d resisted so mightily—there was the elation at overriding my own instincts, elation at the fluid beauty of fire, and terrible fright at the seductiveness of it and the realization of how fast a thing full of human stories can be made to disappear.
• This happened so often that the library had an employee whose main job was to visit the (movie) studios on a regular basis to get the books back.
• Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
• In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.
• Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, “the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.”
• Rabbinical authors often stop using their given names and choose to be called by the title of their books.
• In Poland, (in WWII) eighty percent of all books in the country were destroyed.
• But just as some doctors become murderers, Mao was a librarian who became a book burner.
• Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.
• “The library was my nesting place,” he wrote, “my birthing place; it was my growing place.” Bradbury worked
• Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in a mirror while punching you.
• Southern Pacific Railroad and the Santa Fe Railway were in the middle of a price war, and at one point, a train ticket from Chicago to Los Angeles cost just one dollar, an almost irresistible temptation to head west.
• Her defeat was summed up in the Los Angeles Times with the headline SEQUEL TO LONG QUARREL OVER WHETHER MAN OR WOMAN SHALL BE IN CHARGE—ISIDORE DOCKWEILER AND “MUSHY” MILLER AT LAST GET MISS JONES’ SCALP.
• The cards, shaped like bookmarks, said, “For Later and More Scientific Treatment of This Subject, Consult ______,” followed by a blank space for librarians to list better books on the topic. Lummis noted in his diary that he considered the poison-label brand one of his finest innovations at the library.
• The Times summed up the incident by writing, “The human race . . . has reason to rejoice in this, the dawn of the twentieth century, that has produced . . . and washed out upon the shores of time, Dr. C. J. K. Jones . . .”
• At that instant, the size of the library’s map collection doubled. The sheer bulk of the Feathers Collection is staggering. It occupies the equivalent of two football fields of shelving.
• Of all major criminal offenses, arson is the least successfully prosecuted. The rate of conviction is less than one percent.
• The expansion of the city was so rapid that it was unnerving. It had a quality of metastasis. The sunniness and vitality were ratcheted up so high that it had an undercurrent of weirdness,
• He wanted a building’s form, its art, its ornamental surfaces, its inscriptions, even its landscaping, to connect in a unified theme that reflected the purpose of the building. Experiencing the building would be immersive. Everything about it would work together to tell a story about what the building was. This kind of singularity of design and decoration is typical of religious structures, but it was rare for a secular building. Goodhue
• French intellectual Blaise Pascal’s “Thought is the Grandeur of Man”; and Alexander’s own quote, which seemed to embody the spirit of the public library: “Books invite all; they constrain none.”
• Soldiers weren’t permitted to say exactly where they were deployed, so they often put clues in their letters home, hoping to tip off their families as to where they were. The families, in turn, called the library for help deciphering.
• By 1960, though, the popularity of science books was matched by interest in books that offered what the librarians nicknamed “the cult of reassurance”—books about positive psychology, occultism, witchcraft, Dianetics, and Nostradamus.
• “Well, my hero is Albert Schweitzer. He said, ‘All true living takes place face to face.’
• Some of the murals were so dirty that they looked like dark abstract paintings; the human figures in them looked like rocks. (The layer of grime was so thick that it would ultimately protect them in the fire, like a Teflon shield.)
• The sales of the space underground and the air above raised almost two thirds of the money needed to restore and expand the library.
• The pressure was increased and decreased in intervals, and the temperature was raised and lowered in wild swings. When the first small batch of books was run through the process, six hundred gallons of water seeped out.
• The experience of passing through both buildings would be like walking through an eccentric playhouse and then tumbling over a waterfall.
• 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,
• About two thirds of the fires that have been reexamined turned out not to be arson.
• Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald’s; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one.
• 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.
• Cleveland recently and toured the headquarters of OverDrive, which is the largest digital content catalog for libraries and schools in the world.
• Just a few months after Harry requested an expedited trial, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive and retired from the Los Angeles Lakers.
• It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more.
• A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone.
• a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine