Ray Bradbury, who graduated from high school but didn’t go to university, honed his narrative talents in the theatres and studios of Hollywood, and sharpened his intellect amid the bookshelves of the Los Angeles Public Library. As his family couldn’t afford to send him to university, Bradbury began visiting different sections of the public library as an adolescent and avidly read everything put before him until he was twenty-seven. The library, he wrote later, was “my birthing place; it was my growing place.”
It’s hardly surprising then that he wrote his novel The Fireman, which would ultimately be called Fahrenheit 451, in another library: UCLA’s Powell Library. He suffused the book’s characters, scenes, and words with a disturbing notion: in the future, books will be banned, firemen will spend their time burning down libraries, and readers who want to defend culture will have no choice but to memorize texts before they are turned to ash.
A descendent of Mary Bradbury, who was tried for witchcraft in the seventeenth century as one of the notorious witches of Salem, Ray Bradbury never imagined that, thirty years after his most famous novel was published, the library where he grew as a reader and writer would suffer a devastating fire. Or that, forty years later, the great American journalist Susan Orlean would write about it in the pages of The Library Book, a long narrative essay on the Los Angeles Public Library before, during, and after the fire. Or even less that Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, while researching the book, would conclude that she had to experience a book burning first-hand and so decided to destroy, for this purpose, a copy of Fahrenheit 451.
The Library Book has a fake hero (Harry Peak, the dreamer who may have lit the match in 1986) and dozens of genuine heroes, writers like Ray Bradbury, arson experts, the author’s family (including Orlean’s mother), and, above all, librarians. Like all good books, structure mirrors subject here as a net intertwining the lives, knowledge, and minor adventures of present-day librarians with those who preceded them in the task of giving spiritual, cultural, and social support to the citizens of Los Angeles.
Orlean has constructed a detective story based on the main arson suspect, and yet that narrative line is the least important aspect of the book, which is impressive primarily as a cultural history of the library—from its dusty origins in a desert city to the day before yesterday—and for its scrutiny of the complex nature of an institution of this kind: a machine within which every department and staff member in the central library and its seventy-two branches collaborates in order to bring books and culture to four million inhabitants.
Current director John Szabo is very clear that the library isn’t simply a collection of books, but “a sleek ship of information and imagination”; one that in the near future must become “a fusion of a people’s university, a community hub and an information base, happily partnered with the internet rather than in competition with it.” Reading Szabo’s opinions, and those of so many other individuals in the book, it’s obvious that a global conversation is now taking place about the meaning of books and the spaces they occupy. It’s a conversation with recurring questions: what cultural objects should a library collect and lend? How can reading be encouraged? How does the library relate to the internet? Should it extend its cultural vocation to providing social support? Echoes from possible responses resound in every city, on every continent.
Szabo says that, apart from the obvious consulting and lending of books and other cultural objects, the institution he directs must also offer cultural and literacy programmes, voting registration, storytimes, computer access, and homelessness outreach. Although one only has to visit the Jaume Fuster Library in Barcelona to understand how libraries have become essential spaces in the lives of a city’s homeless, it was last year, in the new Library at the Dock on Melbourne’s seafront, when I saw how a building’s design can reconcile its traditional mission (cataloguing, cultural advising, studying, and lending) with the social mission it has always fulfilled, but now embraces with complete conviction. Alongside multi-use rooms, many equipped with the tools and materials necessary for different handicrafts, the Australian library now has information counters for immigrants and refugees, English-language classrooms, a large reception area, and a café.
For millions of people throughout the world with few or no resources, libraries have become one of the few hospitable spaces in the cities where they live or are passing through. Orlean calls this “the commitment to inclusion.” In increasingly conservative cities, libraries can become embassies, or reminders of solidarity and progress. Because, as the author of The Library Book also says, what is happening in libraries is truly miraculous. They are spaces occupied “peacefully, with total understanding, by a mass of strangers.” Strangers from different social classes, with books and internet at home, or without those things and homeless, who cohabit with books, DVDs, comics, computers, games, daily newspapers, and magazines. Democracy is particularly visible in libraries. That is why they must be defended.
Although Susan Orlean’s docufiction is entirely regional, focusing on a Californian city and its position in the United States, in its final pages she broadens her range and travels to northern Europe to attend the 2015 biennial Next Library Congress, held in the Dokk1 library in Aarhus, Denmark. This was at once an intellectual and political gesture. On the one hand, Orlean wants to see the object of her study, the Los Angeles Public Library, as part of a network of similar projects; on the other, viewing American cultural institutions from the shores of Europe or through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries Initiative (which financed library activities in fifty countries up to the end of 2018), allows her to defend the importance of public libraries in the context of corporate universities and an education and culture that is being increasingly privatized.
While Orlean attends talks on the latest tendencies in librarianship and archiving, the reader is reminded of dozens of individuals and initiatives from the last one hundred and fifty years that have been described in the book and seem just as, or even more, modern as those under discussion in the Next Library Congress. Anecdotes, biographies, and facts demonstrate how libraries have always been laboratories for innovation.
For example, the Los Angeles Public Library’s third director, Mary Foy, a pioneer of the feminization of librarianship that took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (it wasn’t a coincidence that, after being sacked in 1884, after four years in the post, she became a schoolteacher and suffragette), included among her functions locating documents and chasing lenders who returned their books late (she appears in photos with the leather purse where she kept the fines), as well as “refereeing their chess and checker games, which were played all day long in the reading room.” Another of the book’s secondary characters, Tessa Kelso, suggested, in the 1880s, that “the Los Angeles Public Library should lend tennis rackets and indoor games.” And in the 1920s, “the children’s story hour, which was known as Joy Hours for the Wee Folks” attracted a large audience of mothers, children, and nannies. It wasn’t just at the most recent turn of the century that libraries became places for games and families: they’ve been expanding from books to all those spaces that shape us as human beings for a very long time.
“A craze for self-improvement and reinvention thrived in this fresh new place conjured out of the desert,” Orlean notes. Various generations of immigrants found in that library the tools to perform ethical or professional surgery on themselves. Aspiring Hollywood actors found film-star memoirs or acting-technique handbooks there; Italians or Latin Americans, books to perfect their English; future secretaries, volumes to teach them typing or bookkeeping; all newcomers, telephone directories and maps to locate their hopes and design strategies for social progress. Long before tutorials appeared on YouTube, libraries were the place to go for autodidacts.
That meshing of libraries and society didn’t only translate into diverse leisure or educational activities. In the middle of the last century, the American Library Association created “workshops against the Bolshevik threat in order to safeguard users from anti-patriotic thoughts,” which it styled as “How to fight Red deception.” Today we’d call that “fake news.” And the Teen Department was born in 1968, at a time when global awareness was growing about the widening generation gap. The library not only started to stock books for young people, but also organized activities like judo classes or folk and rock concerts (and, a few years later, programming on sexuality, suicide, drug abuse, gangs, and runaways).
“Libraries are society’s original co-working spaces and have the distinct advantage of being free,” we read in The Library Book. In fact, they have been a space for sharing tasks and knowledge from the very first library in Alexandria, which was at once a translation workshop, academy, sanctuary, museum, and archive. In the heart of that institution’s origins, we find the mix of everything that shapes the human brain. From the moment it was burnt down, we have been recreating and reinventing those spaces that define, like no other, the best of humanity. Expanses of light that for over two thousand years have tried to compensate for our surfeit of shadows.