Ponder: The Library Book

The Library Book by Susan Orlean ©2018 is a non-fiction work that initially plucked the chords of my own memory by describing her fond remembrances of her times in the library with her mother. Chapter 1 caused me to recall my own library experiences.

I was in sixth grade when my mother went to work at a job in the post office after being a stay-at-home mom for as long as I could remember. I was not a latch-key child because my mother did not believe it was safe for me to be home alone or to wear a key around my neck  – the classic giveaway I would be unattended. So every day, after school, I would walk the block and a half to my local library and wait there until my dad got off from work and picked me up about two hours later. I was very much into dog books and had set myself a goal of reading all the ones in the children's section of the library. With the old wooden card catalogs - three bays side by side, one each for sorting by subject, by author, and by title – I'd look up DOGS in the subject catalog and find the next author alphabetically.

The children's fiction stacks were arranged in a large U-shape around the perimeter walls enclosing the young adult section of the library's first floor. In the following photo of the library that I frequented, the most distant windows in the front building brought sunlight into the section where I spent my hours after school. After climbing a wide curved marble staircase, I'd pass through heavy brass mullioned glass paned doors, walk by the checkout counter, make a left turn, locate a book or take one out of my book bag, and plunk myself down at one of the long oak tables to read. The Linden library of my childhood, whose interior I have just described, is shown in the photo below. Looming over its roof is the newer updated replacement library building.

Next is the Linden Public Library today. The new building replaced the old one in 2010. I saw it in person when I went back to New Jersey in 2011 but did not go in. I wonder how much of the ambience from the grand marble, elegant brass, and oak finishes was retained in its new, more modern interior.

Did I reach my dog book goal? Frankly, I do not remember. I do recall being hung up a long time at the first corner of the three walls, in the "K" area, reading books by Jim Kjelgaard. Per the Wikipedia entry on the author Jim Kjelgaard 

Kjelgaard wrote more than 40 novels, the most famous of which is 1945's Big Red. It sold 225,000 copies by 1956 and was made into a 1962 Walt Disney film of the same name. His books were primarily about dogs and wild animals, often with animal protagonists and told from the animal's point of view.

The image on the back inside cover of The Library Book was also cleverly done to be nostalgic. A trompe l'oeil of an old checkout card inside a manila pocket was so realistic I tried to remove it to look at it more closely. A small touch of humor was the name of the first person on the card who checked the book out. It was Ray Bradbury of Fahrenheit 451 fame. The other names have significance as well: Edith Gross, Susan Orlean, Austin Gillespie. I have deciphered the significance of one of the four dates but the other three remain a mystery to me.

That is a lot of memories conjured up from the first chapter and the back inside cover of The Library Book. To quote Bob Hope's signature tune, "Thanks for the Memory".

Chapter 2 of The Library Book was positively riveting, describing the fire that raged through the Los Angeles Central Library on April 29, 1986. The physics of fires and the architectural features of the building that hampered its battling were fascinating and detailed. My thoughts were that I wanted to discuss these aspects with my son-in-law who is a fire inspector and that he might really want to read this book, at least Chapter 2. Chapter 3 was about the immediate aftermath of the fire listing estimates of books lost and relating tales of volunteer turnout to salvage what remained. Both these chapters kept me very much engaged. Books water logged from fire extinguishing efforts were frozen to prevent mildew and mold and stored at several facilities to be thawed and potentially salvaged at a later date. Chapter 4 introduces Harry Peak as a strong suspect in setting the fire. This promise of an investigation prompted me to want to read this book.

In Chapter 5 and those thereafter, I bogged down and my fervor to continue reading waned greatly. Each chapter covered a topic of interest about libraries in general in great detail but included such minutiae that my eyes glazed over. However, in the spirit of the Boy Scout motto "Be prepared [to blog]", I inserted page markers for specific passages and jotted down notes to myself as to what I summarized the main idea of some chapters to be. Throughout the book the author included the litany of library managers, painting a picture that included the hair color, hair style, body type, dress-style and foibles of each as well as their management style or lack thereof. Orlean went far beyond merely citing their contribution to the growth of the library in terms of books, collections, and programs added. Per Wikipedia there were 17 city librarians since the inception of the library as a reading room in 1873, through the opening of the Los Angeles Central Library Goodhue building in 1926, during and after the devastating fire in 1986, until present. It was not until the Chapter 21 that the Harry Peak involvement and possible complicity was addressed in earnest. Spoiler Alert: Nothing was ever concluded about his role in setting the fire. I was annoyed that I had read a score of chapters before learning the ambiguity of Harry Peak's role.

Chapters themselves had a number only and no title header; had they been given text headers, I would not have needed to do following exercise for my own edification. 

Chapter  9: litany of burning books in history

Chapter 10: library as haven for the homeless

Chapter 11: fundraising and donations

Chapter 12: various people in post of library manager

Chapter 19: teen and children services

Chapter 18: library architecture

Chapter 24: security

Chapter 29: forensics of arson investigation

Actually, although chapter headings had no titles, interestingly enough each was headed by a listing of four citations. I do not believe they were references the author used for the chapter. Sometimes these books/pamphlets/videos made sense and sometimes not. Chapter 2 is obviously about the fire. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 –  start of book, mold in wet books, and burning books respectively –  made sense after the fact. Chapter 4 introduced Harry Peak so I failed to figure the significance of those citations. The correlations with the Chapter 12 topic...huh? (If I knew how find and to insert a scratching head emoji, I would do so here.) Some chapter heading examples follow:

Even though I felt a bit overwhelmed at times, there were some quotes I ferreted out from the wealth of data and earmarked as wanting to remember, either because of their actual information content or just because of their lyrical descriptive language. I marked those pages with tabs.

• "In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone has died is to say his or her library has burned; our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions." (ch. 8)
• "In the saga of humankind, most things are done for money – arson especially – but there is no money to be made in burning libraries. Instead, libraries are usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic." (ch. 9)
• "Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived." (ch. 9)
• "In the year leading up to the prohibition, when the ban on alcohol seemed inevitable, every book about how to make liquor at home was checked out, and most were never returned.) The run on these books was probably prompted by a Los Angeles Times story LIBRARY BOOZE BOOKS MAY BE THROWN OUT, which reported that if the Prohibition was enacted all of the guides to home brewing were likely to be destroyed.)" (ch. 16)
• "Goodhue [library architect] wanted visitors to feel more than that they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the potency of storytelling." (ch. 18)
• "When the war ended, modern Los Angeles began. The bean fields and orange groves were plowed under and replanted with three-bedroom bungalows." (ch. 18)
• "I rode the elevators downstairs feeling happy. I loved the elevator; it was wallpapered with cards from the old card catalogs – those stained, dog-eared two-by-five paper rectangles, always typed by someone didn't have a firm stroke on the keys, so the letters fade from black to gray, and back to black." (ch. 24)
• "Not every building is as high as it is legally allowed to be, but the building owns the rights to the air-space above it, up to the permitted height. ...  Once the precedent was set, air rights became a salable commodity. For instance, if you had a building that was only seven stories high, which was the case with the Goodhue Building, and zoning would have allowed it to be sixty stories high, you could sell its "right" to the fifty-three more stories to a neighboring building project that wanted to build higher than its allowance." (The library's air rights sold for $28.2 million.) (ch. 25)
• "Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald's; they outnumber retail books stores two to one. In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books." (ch. 30)

The Library Book was all inclusive and yet I felt there was one area not touched upon at all and that is the cataloging system. When, how, and why was the Dewey Decimal system (first published in 1876) introduced and why does the Library of Congress use a different organization system? Per Wikipedia regarding the Dewey Decimal System

The Decimal Classification introduced the concepts of relative location and relative index which allow new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject. Libraries previously had given books permanent shelf locations that were related to the order of acquisition rather than topic.

Per Wikipedia regarding the Library of Congress System (invented in 1897)

It was designed specifically for the purposes and collection of the Library of Congress to replace the fixed location system developed by Thomas Jefferson. LCC has been criticized for lacking a sound theoretical basis; many of the classification decisions were driven by the practical needs of that library rather than epistemological [relating to the theory of knowledge] considerations. Although it divides subjects into broad categories, it is essentially enumerative [to mention separately as if in counting] in nature. That is, it provides a guide to the books actually in one library's collections, not a classification of the world.

For Susan Orlean's The Library Book, the Dewey Decimal number is 027.4794 ORL. First digit 0 is for information, second digit 2 is for library and third digit 7 is for general about libraries. The numbers after the decimal point required more research and understanding than I was willing to invest but the ORL is the author. I remember being taught the Dewey Decimal system in grade school and we were even tested on our memorization of the ten major categories. Per Wikipedia the Dewy Decimal Classes are shown 

From the Library of Congress website catalog I searched on the author Orlean Susan and located the following image for The Library Book. Its Library of Congress number is Z733.L8742 O75 2018. The first letter Z is for Library Science, the O is for Orleans,  and the 2018 is the date of publication. The remainder represents sub-classification categories that are gibberish to me. 

Per Wikipedia the Library of Congress main categories are shown.

At its top level, the Dewey Decimal system uses numbers and the Library of Congress System uses letters. I thought it ironic that the Dewey system lists libraries first as"0" and the Library of Congress lists them last as "Z". Personally I'd always thought the Library of Congress organization made little sense. Maybe it all boils down to what you grew up with. Per Wikipedia also

Libraries in the United States generally use either the Library of Congress Classification System (LC) or the Dewey Decimal Classification System to organize their books. Most academic libraries use LC, and most public libraries and K-12 school libraries use Dewey.

Susan Orlean's book was about public libraries so perhaps inclusion of a cataloging system comparison would have been inappropriate. The book was long enough as is. She certainly touched on a many, many aspects of libraries today, their history, and the role they play in today's society other than merely housing books. Orlean's fondness for libraries is evident and, like a child asked to cull items from his favorite toy collection, I can understand how reducing the number of topics she chose and the depth with which she went into them would be difficult. Despite all the nuggets of wisdom I gleaned from this book, it seemed to go on and on (like this blog post, I fear). The research was excellent, in depth, detailed but, despite the length of this review, I would rate it only two stars in my system. My ratings are typically more a reflection of my short term memory and enjoyment level. Two stars means "Ok, not great; some redeeming features; I finished it". I felt like at points I trudged through this book and so cannot in good conscience recommend it to others. I learned a lot and tried to capture salient points in this post so I can recall them. I am inspired however, and I firmly resolve, next time I am in Southern California, to visit the Los Angeles Central Library. I want to stand in that glorious rotunda of the Goodhue Building and look up. Maybe some knowledge will soak into me by osmosis as Goodhue wanted.