Episode 450: The Library Book

I found myself, when I was reading it, wondering where she was going next. Once I saw it was not simply about her memories of going with her mother or taking her child to the library, it was then about the fire and what happened there. But that quickly morphed into something else. And about halfway through the book, I thought, I do now wonder, with all these subplots, where she's going next, that feeling like, I feel kind of lost and confused.

You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I am Charlie. I'm in the studio with-- well, it's slim pickings right now, folks. It's me, Fred, and Ameet. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme, and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.

That's right, Charlie. Today's show is called The Library Book.

Not just any library book, but, rather, the nonfiction volume published by Susan Orlean in 2018 about the fire at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986.

Described in the book's promotional material, like this. Quote, "the fire reached 2,000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. It was the largest library fire in the history of the United States. It destroyed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more, and shut the library down for seven years." End quote.

As she investigates the fire, Orlean also explores the roles libraries play in cities, families, and individual memory-making.

She says, her relationship with her mother and her memories of visiting the library with her mom as a child inspired the writing of the book.

We did a little reading club for this episode. And speaking of mothers, as we did, our reading club included Wendy's mom, Debbie, who lives in California. You'll hear snippets of Wendy's conversation with Debbie about the book woven throughout today's show.

And if you want to join the conversation, the hashtag for this show is lits450 for Lost in the Stacks, episode 450. You feeling old, Ameet?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I felt old at episode four.

Yeah. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or library fire stories with that hashtag.

And our songs today are about-- wait, let me take a look at this script.

Make sure you get it right.

They're all about burning and flames and fire. CHARLIE BENNETT: Which is only proper. And Marlee Givens, our colleague and co-producer of this episode, has suggested a song that could kick things off and set the tone. It's got references to Los Angeles and references to burning things down. It sounds like it's got everything we need, and Peter Buck on guitar. This is Electrolite by REM, right here on Lost in the Stacks.

Rickenbacker.

I'm outta here That was Electrolite by REM, right here on Lost in the Stacks, a suggestion by our guest co-producer, Marlee Givens, who has slipped into the studio.

That's right.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you for that suggestion. Today's Lost in the Stacks is called The Library Book. It's a book club episode. We're discussing Susan Orlean's, The Library Book. One of our book club members is by recording from far away. Let's hear more from Wendy's mom, Debbie, to start this segment.

OK, so, in my thoughts about it, I kind of separated my thoughts between finding out about this fire in 1986, when I realized, this is a fire that started in LA, which is 30 miles north of where I grew up, and how amazed I was that I had never heard about it. Then, the other thought I had was how we take for granted, not only books, but libraries.

Well, that's kind of a disheartening beginning. But let's go ahead and try and recover from that. So we are a bunch of library professionals who read this book. Now, Debbie, of course, knows about archivists because she's the mom of one. But her take was, oh, it's this huge deal, all of these books, damaged or destroyed, a whole library burning for seven hours at 2,000 degrees. And it just didn't really make the news. I think it would make our news, though.

I think so. Oh, the library news?

Yes. MARLEE GIVENS: Yes, it would make the library news, yeah, yeah. So, Marlee, let's start with a question that's sort of broad, but specific to this room. What was it like, being a librarian and reading this book?

Oh, I was hooked from the first chapter. I read the first chapter. And I remember posting on Facebook, this opening chapter is just-- it's a love letter to libraries. And it's written by someone who, very similar to me, had a formative experience in libraries as a child. I was just going back to chapter 1. In the book, Susan Orlean says, the library might have in the first place I was ever given autonomy. And she describes just being able to go through the stacks and find what she wants to read.

We've talked about vocational awe before on the program, talking about how there's a certain sense of librarianship as a calling, libraries as this incredibly important piece, this romanticized piece of life. And so, as workers, then, we have vocational awe. You should be proud and happy to be working in libraries, even if you're not being paid very much and are being tormented. And The Library Book appeared to be sort of an institutional awe kind of book.

Well, she was coming at it from the perspective of loving the library as a kid. It was the first place-- as Marlee was saying, she says, it was the first place she was able to go wander off on her own. But, then, after she left college, she sort of left the library as a place, as an institution. I think she said-- I wrote down what she said. "I began to wonder what libraries were for." She thought about them wistfully. They were going to be, like, a bookmark to her memory of a certain time.

It is. It is. And she did rediscover it with her own children, right? And it reminds me a little bit of people who grew up going to church. And then they leave the church. And then they come back when they have children. It's a similar thing.

Didn't I just say, institutional awe?

You did say institutional awe.

Or vocational awe, a spiritual awakening. This is Lost in the Stacks. And we're going to be back with more about The Library Book, and probably about how the library burned, after a music set. And you can file this set under TH9119.C36.

You've been listening to Burning Down the House by Talking Heads. Before that, we heard Slow Burn by The Howling Bells, songs about places of refuge not being safe anymore.

Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. We're having a book club episode, discussing The Library Book by Susan Orlean. We'll let Debbie set the stage again for this segment's discussion.

I had an interesting, kind of a coincidental occurrence, that happened the evening before you contacted me, asking me if I'd be interested in talking about the book. I was driving back at night. It was about 7:30. And it's dark. And it's raining. And some of the Christmas lights are up. I really started missing you guys. I started to drive by the library. And I thought, well, I could just go into the library. I could go into the library.

I'm getting a little misty. I have children that, eventually, I will be driving down the road and miss. Thinking about the building itself as a place of refuge, of mental refuge, of comfort, seems to imply something a little bit more than the place that you can get books, or the archives of a city.

OK, you're going to laugh at me again because I'm going to bring up church again.

OK.

But I was just looking in The Library Book. Central Library was designed by the architect, Bertram Goodhue, and opened in 1926. And I looked up Bertram Goodhue. And he has built a lot of churches.

Yeah.

So-- and for a lot of people, they seek that kind of comfort that Debbie mentioned, in both places. And I know that we here on campus have made our library into a third place, a place where you can go and be that's not home. And it's not work. But, I mean, the library can be that thing to so many different-- it can be the thing that somebody needs. CHARLIE BENNETT: And I think there's a very particular distinction between third places and churches and libraries, maybe churches less so.

The free space.

Yeah.

Where it's not governed by capitalist, kind of--

Profit motive or excess value, yeah.

Yeah, and I think there's also, just architecturally, both have high ceilings that immediately elevate the spirit as you walk through. CHARLIE BENNETT: Do you remember, from our Library of Alexandria episode, what the inscription above the entrance might have said? It could translate it as soul hospital. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, or hospital for the soul, or something along those lines. And, yeah, so I think you're obviously on to something, Marlee. I'm certainly going to resist it in a kind of joking way because, obviously, the institutional awe of a church, institutional awe of a library, this huge higher power, one is secular. One is not. But it is a place of-- it's a place that instantiates an idea of how we can become better people and how we can order the world that we exist in.

Right. But, I mean, you're talking about the central library as well. And I've just referenced the Los Angeles Central Library. That's the subject of the book. And branch libraries come up, too. But I think, very different from a church, a central library can exist as a symbol of the city, as a place for the city to be proud of. And we're seeing that in Atlanta, where our central library, which was built during a time when downtown Atlanta was thriving. They brought in a famous architect.

Now, you should explain that a little bit more. It's not being declared a branch library, so much as the way that it's been changed appears to diminish its centrality.

Right. Well, it is taking up less of a footprint in the building. Half of the building is being leased out for other purposes. And, I mean, symbolically, it is becoming a branch. It's no longer going to have the stature that it did when it was built, or even 10 years ago.

In The Library Book, the Susan Orlean book, she talks about a library bond issue to raise money for that Los Angeles Public Library that burned down. Actually, it was to raise money for the building that eventually came to be and that burned down later, the Goodhue building.

Don't let them have the better stadium.

Right. But it was, the library is about the mind. So, yeah, it is a symbol about how highfalutin and book-learned they are.

I think, also, there's the idea that the library, especially if you come out of the Carnegie push and Dewey's early on, like, this is what we're for, the library represents the idea that we are going to have a better citizenry, or a more engaged and informed citizenry. And so, all of us will be uplifted in that way. I'm not a church-going person. So I don't know how people feel about being church-going people now.

One thing they might have in common is the gut-wrenching that happens when one burns down and is destroyed.

Yeah, you don't have to deconsecrate a library, though. You just got to take the books out.

Well, you don't have to deconsecrate a church if it's Protestant.

I think Fred knows more about this than I do. Ameet, get us out of here.

Well, we'll be back with more on Lost in the Stacks, the left side of the hour.

Hi, this is Wayne Clough, President Emeritus of Georgia Tech and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution. And you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.

I could listen to that ID this whole show, man, just over and over again. Today's Lost in the Stacks is called The Library Book. OK, real talk. Have you ever stolen a library book?

Susan Orlean talks about how frequently books go missing, how frequently people just take them and never return them. And I did that once in my life, when your grandmother, so when my mom was dying. And we were reading to her. Her favorite book was David Copperfield. So I had brought a copy of David Copperfield from the Los Altos Library. And that was the copy we were reading to her when she actually died. So I simply could not return that copy of the book. And I told them, I had lost the book.

We don't have any information about the note. File this set under TL573.H52.

I mean, the whole idea of archiving, being an archivist, is to do this, that it's important to hold on to these things. It's obviously gone beyond holding on to a special manuscript, or book, or periodical. It is where we are today with everything that's digital that you all do. And it just gets bigger and bigger. It just balloons, doesn't it, mushrooms to appear like, I've got to hold on. I've got to get that. I've got to steal that book.

Yeah.

Reading this was so cathartic to me because I do work in preservation, with the purpose being mostly saving stuff, feeling the profound importance of the individual's memory. And always inherent in that desire, that feeling driven to save, is the necessity to destroy, or appraise, or select, or be willing to let go of something that you can't save. And so, the fire, everything with the fire was so cathartic to me because I have so much anxiety about saving stuff.

Yeah, that, maybe, you would still be OK if you let it all burn, whatever that, it, is.

Whoa, you just heard from Wendy and her mom. And before that was Libraries by Yellow Ostrich, a blast from the past for this radio show. And we started with Flames Go Higher by The Eagles of Death Metal, right after some of Debbie's thoughts on The Library Book. Those were songs about flames going up and buildings coming down.

This is Lost in the Stacks. And our show today is all about Susan Orlean's The Library Book and our responses to it. And we have come to the final segment and the final thing, the fire, the bright, cleansing, apocalyptic fire.

It apparently it was so hot that it wasn't a color anymore. It was clear. You could see straight through it. And it was almost hot enough to just completely destroy everything that it touched.

I have to admit that I am completely empathetic to Wendy's reaction to the fire, this idea that it's, like, very compelling that, to make it impossible to save anything, releases you of the responsibility to save something, to choose something, to start from scratch.

Yeah, and this creation and destruction, the cycle of creation and destruction, there's a conflation of the two terms, creative destruction, which suggests that the only way new ideas emerge is when older ideas are destroyed. The library is a site for that, through weeding, and cataloging, and superimposing new books on old ones, or new electronic materials on older ideas.

Let's not forget, though. Wendy is an archivist, so a different mission than just a librarian. And even Wendy, the archivist, has a little bit of a lean in when it comes to the idea of a fire destroying everything. Where do you stand with that, Fred?

I think Susan Orlean has kind of a sympathetic view, maybe not totally aligned with the archivist view, but a sympathetic view. She talks about, in the book, about libraries being sort of, like, not where time stops. But it's a dam onto stopping a river, and that all the stories and narratives and things are accumulated there and just, like, continuously added to. So that's a nostalgic and maybe wistful way to look at libraries.

In one of the chapters, Orlean also riffs on what she says is a Senegalese slang, or phrase, for someone dying. She says, "the polite expression for saying someone died is to say that his or her library has burned." And then, she takes that idea and says, we each have a private library, like, the record of what has happened in us, to us, around us.

Marlee, have you destroyed anything in your personal archive?

Oh, just by being almost 50 years old, that things kind of float away.

In the archive of your memory.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, but, in my personal archive of stuff?

Yeah.

Yes, I married someone who taught me the joy of letting go of stuff. And it's been no trouble, no trouble to let things go. Now, it doesn't mean that I'm not delighted when I come across something that's really old, something from my past. But as a child of two pack rats, it's been great to get shed of some of that. Can I say one more thing from the book, though?

Yes, please.

Do we have enough time? So you mentioned the Library of Alexandria before. So the next chapter, after what you were just reading, she talks about the Library of Alexandria. And she said that, by the time it burned for the final time, "people had begun to believe it was a living thing, an enormous, infinite, communal brain, containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers."

[LAUGHS] The books can't talk to each other, not yet.

No, no, not yet.

Even though the network can.

Yeah.

So we think of the library as the memory of a place, the memory of a culture. And then, we compare ourselves to a library, the idea of our memories being, somehow, records that you can access. But I think we're totally uncatalogued. People are. I don't think we do a very good job of creating, finding aids, or, often, we're lost in the stacks of ourselves. So the library is a desire to make order out of a mental chaos. And, yet, the library burned.

Well, I'll close the way Susan Orlean closed in her book. She says, on the very last page, "this is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me, but feels like it's mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in this world seem conquered by a library's simple, unspoken promise. Here I am. Please tell me your story. Here is my story. Please listen."

Ameet shakes his head, nods his head, says, yes, take it away, Fred.

So, we'll be back, after having scratched the surface of the library.

There you go.

Once again, as is our usual practice on this show. But we'll be back, after a music set.

File this burning set under Z733.L8742O75.

Blue Crystal Fire by Robbie Basho.

Don't you want to do some vibrato when you say that? (SINGING) Blue

I cannot do that justice. That was impressive, impressive singing I want to burn you down, by Mike Doughty, songs about the beauty of creation and destruction-- well, mostly destruction.

WENDY HAGENMAIER: I keep returning to what you said at the beginning, of this idea of taking the library for granted or in the background, that it couldn't even matter or be noticed. And then, very quickly, it can, like, slip into something that's both, like, incredibly powerful for as a refuge or as a sanctuary, right? But, also, as threatening, the book being the thing that anybody needs to steal because they need that.

There's kind of everything in there, if you really consider it. And hearing the history of that, the one library, this one library. But that's just one library. That's not even libraries in the world. All of that goes on, and has gone on.

Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe.

That's you.

And, today, Marlee Givens.

Fred was our engineer today. And the show was brought to you in part by The Library Collective and their social and professional network, a league of awesome librarians. Find out more about them at thelibrarycollective.org.

Legal counsel and a box of strike anywhere matches were provided by the Burroughs Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.

Special thanks to Susan Orlean for writing the book, to her mother, for taking her to the library, to Wendy's mom, Debbie, for joining our book club from afar. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.

Find us online at lostinthestacks.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix.

Next week, on Lost in the Stacks, we're going to the movies, because that's what you do for Christmas these days.

It's time for our last song. As librarians, from time to time, we may talk about burning down existing systems. But it's all metaphorical, right? Metaphorically, just--

Yeah.

Foucault, right? CHARLIE BENNETT: Metaphorical, Ameet. In truth, libraries inspire in us the fires of the internal and heartfelt kind of passionate enthusiasm for our professional and principled missions. So let's close with a song about the flames that burn inside us. From 1941, this is I Don't Want To Set the World on Fire by The Ink Spots, right here on Lost in the Stacks.

This is going to be great. Have you heard this song, Ameet? You're going to love this.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

I don't want to set--