The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

Gonzalo was about to drive a route that started at the Arroyo Seco branch, on the northeast edge of the city, and continued on to ten other branches, including Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Eagle Rock, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. There are seven delivery routes in the city. Some of the books being shipped are permanently shelved at Central Library and are heading out on loan. Other books are from branches, and because the shipping department uses a hub system, they pass through Central en route to whatever branch requested them and will pass through Central once more on their way home. The books are tagged like luggage. I pawed through a pile that was waiting to be packed. According to the slip of paper tucked inside, Lucia Berlin’s short story collection’s usual resting place was the Robertson branch, but it was on its way to a patron who had requested it at Arroyo Seco. A DVD called The Great Indian Railway had come from the San Pedro branch, was changing planes at Central, and would continue on to Lincoln Heights. Someone at the Westchester branch was waiting for Mo Willems’s Happy Pig Day, which was traveling via Central from North Hollywood. A patron at the El Sereno branch was waiting for The Bible Handbook of Difficult Verses, which had come from Sherman Oaks. Solids, Liquids, and Gases, which belonged full-time to Central, was taking a trip to Studio City.

  The people in shipping know all the trends. They can tell when a book has been recommended by Oprah, because they will pack dozens of copies that have been requested all over the city. They know that the day after any holiday, the load will be heavy: Apparently, everyone in Los Angeles gets on the computer right after Thanksgiving dinner and makes requests for diet books. For some reason no one can explain, a lot of books from the Arroyo Seco branch end up borrowed by patrons at the Chinatown branch. In the middle of the school year, the SAT study guides are big travelers. Before tax time, all the financial advice books are on the fly.

  The one woman in the department, Barbara Davis, dropped Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and a picture book called The Bear Ate Your Sandwich in a bin that was heading to the Northridge branch. “I am tired,” she said, unprompted. Barbara is a wide, chesty woman with a close-cropped Afro and an air of deep, bemused exasperation. She took the job in the library’s Shipping Department after a stint at the city’s Convention Center. “I was packing there, too,” she said, “but just tables and chairs. No books.” She told me that she was counting the days until retirement. “Hey, I been with the city for thirty-three years, and I’m ready, baby.” She tapped the pocket of her blouse and added, “I got my retirement papers right here.” I assumed she meant that figuratively, but then she pulled out a wad of paper from the City of Los Angeles noting her upcoming retirement and pension arrangements. She put the papers back in her pocket and asked if I knew how to pack a bin of books. I didn’t, so she demonstrated how to wedge them together efficiently. “See, you need to have a strategy,” she said. She wiggled a meaty vegetarian cookbook into a sliver of space beside an oversize The Architecture of John Lautner. Next, she wedged four large bunny puppets that a children’s librarian at Wilshire had requested from the Children’s Department at Central into a bin that at first appeared to be completely full. Then she filled a bin with supplies bound for the Wilshire branch, which apparently had a need for several rolls of tape. She did all of this without looking. She said that she didn’t mind working at the library, but she didn’t count herself as a book lover. “I don’t like to read too much,” she said, fitting Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek into a bin marked for Van Nuys. The bin was now more than full, so she banged on it—a signal to the truck driver that it was ready to load. Gonzalo picked it up and dropped it in the back of the truck. Barbara wiped her hands on her thighs and grabbed an empty bin. Her hands roamed over the pile of books, sizing and squeezing them as if they were melons. She cocked her head at me. “You read and read and read and read,” she said, “and then what?”

  When John Szabo was in graduate school for library science at the University of Michigan, he was known as Conan the Librarian, which is hilarious because he is so un-barbarian-like, although back then he was quite fierce about his job running the small library in his residence hall. This was in the early 1990s, the moment when Internet service providers were introduced to the general public, and for the first time in history, the status of libraries as the only and best storehouses of information was challenged. Szabo received his library degree just as people were beginning to wonder whether libraries were viable or even necessary in the newly wired world.

  Szabo was born in Orlando in 1968. He grew up in Alabama, mostly near air force bases, where libraries are revered. His father, who was retired from the air force, often left John at the base library on nights when he had his bowling league. Szabo loved books, and he was fascinated by the process of borrowing books—the way they came and went, how they were a medium of exchange and connection within the community. One of his favorite library items was the Gaylord book charger, a big metal box at the checkout desk that stamped due dates on book slips and nipped off a chad to keep the slip properly aligned.

  At sixteen, Szabo became a clerk for the circulation desk at the base library. At twenty-two, he became Conan the Librarian. As soon as he finished graduate school, he applied for a job in Robinson, Illinois—a town of eight thousand people that made its mark in popular culture in 1914, when a local schoolteacher invented the Heath bar. Most of the area’s residents either worked at the Heath factory or were farmers, and they were benignly neglectful of the Robinson library. Szabo chose to apply for the job in Robinson because he was impressed by the town’s human resources policy, which took unexpectedly progressive positions, considering it was a conservative rural area. One of the first things Szabo did after he settled into the job was introduce himself to local farmers, then persuade them to vote in favor of a tax levy to support the library—a seemingly impossible feat that he achieved through judicious application of his charm and affability. Szabo stayed at the Robinson library over three years and then was hired away to run the library in Palm Harbor, Florida. A few years later, he was recruited to be director of the library system in Clearwater, Florida. He was in Clearwater over six years, and while living in Clearwater, he met his partner, Nick, who is a teacher.

  In 2005, Szabo was hired to run the Atlanta library. It was a job many people would have found daunting and some would have deemed impossible. At the time, Atlanta was a sprawling system with a main library and thirty-four branches, a staff of more than five hundred, and a shattered psyche. It was one of the last library systems in the South to integrate—until 1959, it served only white patrons. The adjustment to integration came in fits and starts, and racial issues continued to dog the library for decades. Szabo was hired in the backwash of a particularly divisive incident. In 2000, seven white librarians in the downtown branch were demoted and replaced by African American librarians. This occurred after the chairman of the library board announced that he thought there were too many “old, white women” managing the downtown library and that the board needed “to get rid of them.” An African American employee who complained on the white librarians’ behalf was also demoted. The librarians sued the board and the library’s director for racial discrimination. Library board meetings in Atlanta had always been televised on a public access channel and, most of the time, probably drew an audience in the double digits. During the days of the lawsuit, the meetings were so volatile that people tuned in to watch in droves. After three years of bitter back-and-forth, the librarians won an $18 million settlement, and the following year, the director of the library was fired. Szabo was hired soon after, in 2005.

  Szabo is tall and gangly, with a small, square head, a trim goatee, and a seemingly hard-to-reach boiling point. He is a master of the friendly conspiratorial wink and whisper. He gives the impression of being a perfect gentleman, with Southern manners and a military decorum. For Los Angeles to hire him away from Atlanta was considered a coup, because he had developed a reputation in the library world as being one of the few directors who
was figuring out the transition from pre-Internet to omnipresent-Internet, and who was successfully rigging the library to sail into the future not as a gigantic, groaning, fusty pile of books but as a sleek ship of information and imagination. Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people’s university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.

  In Los Angeles, the library is designated as a city department, just like the police and the city attorney and the dogcatcher. The head of the library is a city manager, hired—and fired—by the mayor. Antonio Villaraigosa, the forty-first mayor of Los Angeles, hired Szabo in 2012. Villaraigosa’s term ended just a few months later, while Szabo was still unpacking his belongings. The incoming mayor, Eric Garcetti, began his term by asking every city department head to reapply for his or her job. Some of them did not get their jobs back, but Szabo did, and finished unpacking.

  Szabo’s office is on the fourth floor of the Goodhue Building, in a room that he has decorated with odds and ends he has come across while rummaging in the library’s basement. One side of his office is dominated by ornate brass lamps from the old Children’s Reading Room. He found them stowed behind a pile of junked furniture, caked with dust and dirt. On his desk and coffee table, he has a few of the gifts made for people who donated to help restore the library after the fire. One is a fancy metal letter opener modeled on the shape of the building; another is a pair of bookends that are miniatures of the turban-topped sphinxes flanking the staircase near the rotunda.

  When I’d left the Shipping Department and made my way up to Szabo’s office, he was already in a meeting with the budget analyst, Robert Morales, and the business manager, Madeleine Rackley, in which they were doing some fine-tuning of the library’s $172 million annual budget. As a city department, the library is medium-size. It is larger than the zoo, which gets $20 million from the city (a sum that includes $13,000 for reindeer care and $108,000 for a visitor-directed “giraffe feeding experience”), but much smaller than the fire department, which clocks in at $630 million a year.

  That day, Szabo was dressed in a button-down shirt with tiny pale blue checks, a blue-and-purple tie, and neatly pressed khakis. He wears round owlish glasses that, combined with his taste for tidy clothes, make him look like a tenure-track English professor. Almost every hour of his day was booked, in part because he was leaving the next morning at dawn to attend a library conference in Toronto about how libraries can innovate. From Toronto he was heading to Ohio for a meeting of Online Computer Library Center, a global cooperative of twenty thousand libraries located in 122 countries around the world. Szabo is the head of the board. After the meeting in Ohio, he was planning to return to Los Angeles, and a short time later, he would be heading to Washington, D.C., to receive the National Medal for Museum and Library Service, which is bestowed on five libraries a year.

  Some of Szabo’s job has a narrower focus. A few days earlier, a group of local beekeepers asked him for permission to put a colony of hives on the roof of the library. When he told me about the request, I began to wonder who was empowered to give that kind of permission—I wasn’t sure whether the library had a roof manager, or an animal colony manager, or someone who served as a combination thereof. It turned out that the authority lies with the city librarian. I asked whether there would soon be library honey. Szabo said the project was likely to rise or fall on the question of whether it would serve the public good, as so many matters in the library do, but in the meantime, he was reading up on urban beekeeping.

  The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace. The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited. In the case of the beehives, that subset might include people who are afraid of bees or are allergic to bees. Hives on the roof are a more modest proposition than, say, beehives in the main reading room. But there was the chance that bees living on the roof would wander into the building, or start to hang around the entrances, or be a nuisance in some other way. Szabo seemed to love the idea of making use of the roof, especially for something unexpected, like beehives, but he said the decisive fact would be if there were people who would stay away from the library on account of them.

  Consideration of the beehives was tabled for the moment, and Szabo turned to budget details with Morales and Rackley. The library was in the middle of a special amnesty period for book fines.

  “How much is this costing us?” Szabo asked Morales.

  “It’s definitely a loss of revenue,” Morales replied. “There are a lot of overdue books.” Outside the window, the air was suddenly split by the nasal beep of construction equipment backing up. After about thirty seconds, the beeping stopped sharply, and something heavy and metallic came clattering down. Everyone looked at the window for a moment and then returned to the discussion. The book-fine amnesty seemed to be settled, and Szabo ran his finger up and down his notepad. Once he found his place, he looked up and said he was planning to ask the city council to fund a monthly homeless outreach program at the library.

  “Our core mission is not to end homelessness,” Rackley cautioned. “Our core mission is to be a library.”

  “But the homeless are already here,” Szabo said. “We want to provide a setting to coordinate entry into all of the city’s different homeless services.” A test run of the program, called The Source, was scheduled for later that week. Szabo wrote something on his pad and then continued to the next topics: an update on the new digital maker space; a flu shot program; and the news that Terminal 7 at LAX Airport had agreed to install a library kiosk, which would enable travelers to check out audio and e-books on the spot. Discussion of the kiosk reminded Szabo that a bike-share company had asked to place one of its stands on the sidewalk outside the library.

  “I love bicycles,” Szabo said. “It’d be great to have it here.”

  “Can we move the stand, adjust its location, once it’s plopped down?” Rackley asked, looking worried. “If we don’t like where it is?”

  Szabo said he would find out, glanced at his watch, excused himself, and then stood up to leave to head to his next appointment, which was at the Washington Irving Branch Library.

  We rode the staff elevator downstairs and crossed through the shipping department. Szabo greeted many of the crew by name, and they waved at him without removing their headphones. We walked into the main part of the garage and hopped in Szabo’s car. When we emerged from the dim garage, the sun hit us with a wallop, like a blast from a water cannon. We headed to a neighborhood between the Santa Monica Freeway and Crenshaw Boulevard. The neighborhood is officially called Mid-City, but it is often referred to as Crenshaw. The area is wide and bright, a grid of small streets crisscrossed with boulevards and the welt of the I-10 freeway running along its southern edge. Szabo turned off the main road onto a sunny residential street and then parked near a chain-link fence. A lean, dark-haired woman was waiting by the fence with a clipboard and an expectant expression. “You made it!” she said, leaning toward the car. She introduced herself as Eloisa Sarao, the library’s assistant business manager. A rogue gust of wind rolled down the street and fiddled with the sheets on her clipboard. She slapped them down and said, “Let’s go in!”

  The chain-link fence encircled a brick and stucco building that looked like it had once been beautiful but now was ruined by the ragged, ashen look of abandonment. Its grand lintel, carved with the words LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY WASHINGTON IRVING BRANCH, sat like a stone crown. The library
had been built in the neoclassical temple style popular in library design in 1926. The neighborhood around it had been working class, but slipped in the last few decades; unemployment and crime in Crenshaw are now higher than city averages. The houses are square and simple, with slivers of lawns and security bars on their living room windows. Even in its distress, the library sits among them with a regal presence. In 1987, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Like many of the libraries of its period, it didn’t meet earthquake standards and had inadequate parking and a dearth of space inside. Its location, right on a residential street, was hard to find. Nonetheless, the community loved it.

  In 1990, the city announced that it was closing the Washington Irving branch and building a new library thirteen blocks away, on the site of a former car wash. The neighbors turned out in force to protest, but the city council prevailed. The new library was built. Ever since, the old one, which had served the neighborhood for sixty-five years, has stood empty, settling into dereliction like an old dog settling onto a shabby couch. The sun has punished it. The fence has become almost a feature of the natural landscape; it leans like a tree in the wind and has rusted into a smudgy, earthen shade of silvery red. The tough, grasping roots of bindweed and goosegrass and mare’s tail have cracked the ground around the fence and cut a crazed pattern in the pavement around the building. The boarded-up windows look like punched-out eyes in a blank face.

  As we stood taking in the sadness of the scene, crickets trilled merrily in the weeds. Marigold-yellow No Trespassing tape fluttered and swayed like a festival banner. Signs announcing various individuals’ desire to buy ugly houses and to clean gutters were zip-tied to the fence. A faded paperback of Strawberry Shortcake’s Cooking Fun was stuck at the bottom of the fence beside a batch of brown leaves and some plastic wrappers, like flotsam beached at low tide. The street, Arlington Avenue, was enveloped in a midday hush. A block away, traffic raged. A plump man walked past us, leading a blue-eyed dog on a piece of twine. After a moment, Sarao opened the padlock and pushed the fence open, then unlocked the library’s front door. It opened reluctantly, with a hard, harsh cough. The main room was grand, with high ceilings spanned by glossy wooden trusses. “My goodness,” Szabo said, picking his way across the floor. The litter was ankle-deep. It included beer cans, a fairly nice-looking size-M leather belt, a bottle of Oil of Olay body wash, a number of flattened potato chip bags, and a lot of unidentifiable clumps of assorted trash. A copy of a book called The Way of Adventure: Transforming Your Life and Work with Spirit and Vision sat on the front desk, as if someone had been standing there with it, waiting to check out, at the very moment the library closed and became frozen in time.