by Susan Orlean
The library cough came from the sooty air. The library shuffle was the sleepwalk of anxiety. Even though the city’s safety department assured them otherwise, the staff feared that the fire had torn open walls and released asbestos. They worried that the library would never reopen or would never rebuild its collection. They worried that the arsonist would try again. Even worse, they worried that the arsonist was someone on the staff. Many people at the library considered their coworkers family. Now the family was riven with suspicion. One clerk in the History Department sent a memo to the police accusing another clerk of being the arsonist. “She has developed a reputation for being belligerent and angry with coworkers,” he wrote, noting that the clerk had access to the area where the fire started. Investigators didn’t dismiss the possibility that someone on the staff started the fire, and they questioned many staff members, including anyone who called in sick the day of the fire. Any staff member who could be described as “disgruntled” was questioned, too. Not long ago, I spent the afternoon with a retired librarian named Mel Rosenberg, who happened to have been out of town the day of the fire. “Oh, they checked up on me,” Rosenberg said. “They wanted to make sure I was where I said I was.” He began laughing loudly and recalled that when he was hired, Wyman Jones had warned him that he better not be too liberal. “I said, oh my God, Wyman, do you think there are any conservative librarians?” Rosenberg was laughing so hard that I thought he might cry. Then he started thinking about the fire again and grew somber. “All the magazines in my department, the Art Department, were gone. All of them. It was terrible. You have no idea.”
The arson investigators continued interviewing staff, with special attention to anyone who stood out for any reason. A memo was circulated to administrators, suggesting there should be a “plan of action” if the arsonist turned out to be an employee. The plan included a news blackout, a rehearsal for answering “difficult questions,” and a suggestion that the staff should be informed by either “telephone network” or “a hand-carried written memo.”
Twenty-four of Central’s 250 librarians soon asked for transfers to other branches. A survey of the remaining staff asked what the most stressful aspect of the fire was. The answers were dire. They included: “Feeling of powerlessness, helplessness brought about by confusion . . . feeling of isolation of having to work in an almost empty shell of a building that was once a vital place”; “Being afraid that, even though nobody was killed in the fire, somebody is going to get killed or badly hurt because of so many safety problems”; and “Feeling like a refugee. Holes ripped in an organic entity.” Local newspapers reported on the staff’s malaise. POST-FIRE DESPAIR RAISING TENSIONS AMONG LIBRARIANS, one story was headlined. The librarians complained of eye infections, breathing difficulties, skin irritation, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The head of the Audiovisual Department told the Los Angeles Daily News, “The first few days after the fire, I’d come home and light a match, and the whole library came back into my head.” One memo between administrators warned, “The staff here can’t stand the conditions. They are sweeping floors and scrubbing sinks . . . There should be guards during working hours at least since the arsonist is still at large.” One senior librarian, interviewed by the Librarians’ Guild, said, “Well, working conditions are abysmal. Morale varies . . . There has been an amazing amount of public support. Many librarians don’t know how the public supports them in any concrete way.” On the other hand, some librarians felt so isolated in their gloom that they became estranged from their spouses. Glen Creason told me that many marriages, included his, imploded in the months after the fire.
The library’s administration became so concerned about the librarians’ state of mind that they brought in a psychologist, Dr. Stanley Ksionzky, to conduct group therapy sessions. Dr. Ksionzky encouraged the librarians to engage in “fantasy visualization” of how nice the library would be when it reopened. For those who worried that their patrons felt abandoned, Dr. Ksionzky encouraged them to imagine the patrons using other branches and doing well. The librarians themselves tried to find something to laugh about in the wreckage. Those who were relocated to a gloomy city building on Rio Vista Avenue wrote a song to the tune of “Oklahoma!” that began, “Rio Vista / Where the car thieves pass the time of day / And if you survive the eight-to-five / You’ll go home with a dollar twenty-five / And so we are taking this stand / For the dust we are breathing is grand . . .” Someone suggested they should form a library band because the song was such a hit with the staff. A note was posted on the staff bulletin board reading, “Whereas the only available succor has been dangled as a carrot in the form of group therapy, the following groups are signed up to avail themselves of the existing means of healing and mending.” It was followed by a list of proposed band names, incorporating names of some of the librarians, including “Betty Gay and the Depressions,” “Dan Dupill and the Bitters,” and “Bill Byrne and the Arsonists.”
8.
Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Exposé of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free (2003)
By Icke, David
909 I17-3
Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split (2007)
By Perry, Laurie
392.3428 P463
Hackers and Hacking: A Reference Handbook (2013)
By Holt, Thomas J.
364.38 H7578
Organize Your Digital Life: How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, and Personal Documents in a Digital World (2009)
By Baldridge, Aimee
621.3819533 B178
Every month, more than seven hundred new books arrive at the library. They are then offloaded, unboxed, stamped, stickered, linked to the electronic catalog system, snugged in a Mylar cover, bar-coded, and, finally, let loose on the shelves. It takes almost a week to process a new book. One afternoon when I was in the Collection Services Department, where this processing takes place, the books that had just arrived included 100 Interiors Around the World; Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” Program; and Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master. There was also a stack of Spanish, Russian, Armenian, and Swedish books that were making their way to the International Languages Department.
Peggy Murphy, who manages Collection Services, started her library career as a teenager in Mount Vernon, New York, at a time when the head librarian summoned clerks using the kind of metal clicker now most often used to train dogs. Each clerk was summoned by his or her unique click pattern. Murphy’s was two short clicks. The books that the head librarian in Mount Vernon deemed “dangerous”—that is, sexual—were shelved in a locked metal cage in the basement of the library. Baudelaire, Balzac, and Masters and Johnson were there, behind bars. Somehow, Murphy figured out where the key to the cage was stored, and during her breaks, she sneaked in and read. By the time she graduated from high school, she had managed to read every single one of the caged books. “It broadened my worldview,” she likes to say.
A popular book that gets checked out often begins to fall apart in a year, so many of the books that arrive in the Catalog Department are replacement copies of books the library already owns. A book like, say, The Da Vinci Code, which is checked out dozens of times each month, is lucky to last a full year. Some books are replaced before they fall apart. For instance, baby-name books are traded out regularly. “Pregnant women don’t want to handle a grubby book, so we keep those nice and fresh,” Murphy said.
Other books have a tendency to be loaned out and never returned. The library has bought countless copies of Carlos Castaneda’s books because so many of them journey out and never come back. Another author, David Icke, who writes about his global conspiracy theories and about a race of reptilian aliens he believes will eventually dominate Earth, are ranked—anecdotally, at least—as the books that disappear most frequently. Icke has
such acquisitive readers that for a while the library simply stopped ordering replacement copies of his books because it was costing too much to keep up. The day Elvis Presley died, someone checked out all of the library’s Elvis records and never returned them. The files about the Manson Family and about the Black Dahlia murder, which included clippings and ephemera, disappeared decades ago; they are essentially irreplaceable. In 1981, investigators discovered a woman selling books out of a suite in a Beverly Hills hotel. She was earning approximately forty thousand dollars a year with her used-book business. All of the books had been stolen from the Los Angeles Public Library. In 1982, ten thousand books that had gone missing from the library were found in the Los Angeles home of a library clerk named Glenn Swartz, who said he thought he had a hoarding problem. (He resigned from his job.) People have been caught trying to sneak books out in baby strollers, which sometimes have babies in them and sometimes don’t.
For years, movie studios were major book-pinching culprits. Rather than simply checking out books they needed for their research—and thus having to abide by the due date—studios sometimes dispatched two assistants to the library to steal them. The scheme involved one of the assistants taking a position outside a window and the other pitching the desired book out the window to his or her counterpart. This happened so often that the library had an employee whose main job was to visit the studios on a regular basis to get the books back. To help foil the through-the-window scheme, the librarians also wired shut all the windows that were most often used. (In spite of this obvious case of cross-purposes, the library has always had a close relationship with the studios. A 1950s library brochure called THEY WANTED THE FACTS . . . and Found Them in the Library noted, “Motion picture studios try to avoid boners by extensive [library] . . . research. Twentieth Century Fox combed the library’s files . . . for contemporary views on a famous murder case!”)
Near Peggy Murphy’s office sits an old book-stitching machine—a bulky metal contraption about the size and shape of a snowplow. The machine is so old that ready-made parts are no longer available for it. The City of Los Angeles used to have an in-house municipal bindery department. Over time, the bindery was reduced from a large department to a small department and eventually to a single bookbinder, who sewed up broken books from the library as well as from other city departments. When you think about it, cities own thousands of books and bound material—law journals for district attorneys; directories; reference material; city ordinances; and more. The last of the city’s official bookbinders retired in 2014. No one was hired to replace her, and “bookbinder salary” is no longer a line item in the city budget. These days, library books that are rare or expensive are sent to private restorers if they need emergency surgery. Ordinary books that start to fall apart are simply thrown out, and new copies are bought in their place.
The old book-stitching machine sits about ten yards from a cluster of seven-foot-tall computer towers through which flow a hundred megabytes of information per second. The Los Angeles Public Library has been online since 1994, which was much earlier than many other systems. This was an unanticipated upside of the fire. Rudimentary electronic book catalogs became available in the seventies, but the more sophisticated online systems similar to what are available today were developed around 1990. Initially, many libraries resisted upgrading to these improved systems because they had already invested in the first iteration of the electronic catalogs and couldn’t afford to upgrade yet again. But Los Angeles had lost so many books in the fire that its old-fashioned card catalog was no longer even remotely accurate, and it had never bought into the early electronic catalogs because the fire had made a book inventory impossible. The surviving collection had to be inventoried again, along with the hundreds of thousands of books that were purchased to replace the burned ones. Rather than rebuilding the original catalog, the library decided to start fresh with an electronic one. It was one of the first major libraries in the country to do so.
According to Matthew Mattson, who is in charge of it, the library’s website was visited more than eleven million times in 2015, and the catalog was browsed more than ten million times. Among the visitors are quite a few hackers. Mattson told me that he observes someone trying to hack into the library’s website almost every day. Most of the intruders appear to be based in China or Russia. Hacking into a library’s website seems pointless, since you can access it legitimately anytime, so I asked Mattson why anyone would bother. “They’re practicing,” he said. As he explained it, people hack into the library to rehearse hacking into bigger, more secure, and more valuable targets.
The most popular picture in the library’s photography collection is of a five-year-old elephant named Bimbo Jr. riding a surfboard. The picture ran in the Los Angeles Herald in 1962. According to the caption, Bimbo Jr. had “the rare distinction of being the youngest elephant to perform this remarkable feat,” a peculiar sort of caption that implies that other elephants surf, too, and Bimbo’s specialness was only his tender age. The second most popular photo, measured by how often it is visited online or ordered as a print, is one from the 1950s featuring girls in tight bloomers shooting arrows at a stack of beach balls. The runner-up is a picture of a Volkswagen bus filled with a large number of cats, parked on Venice’s Muscle Beach; the date and photographer are unknown. Most of the 3.4 million photos in the library’s collection came into its possession as physical prints. Every day, a few more are scanned and put online, where they can be searched by keywords and descriptions. Some pictures in the collection are the work of famous photographers. Ansel Adams came to Los Angeles in 1939 and documented the early years of the aerospace industry, and he donated those negatives to the library. African American photographer Roland Curtis documented Los Angeles’s black community in the 1960s and ’70s and donated his archives as well. Most of the 3.4 million pictures are everyday photographs. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, published from 1903 until 1989, donated its collection of two million images to the library in 1991. The Valley Times, a suburban paper published from the 1940s until the 1970s, donated its library of forty-five thousand images when it closed down.
It will take four years to scan all of the Valley Times photographs. One of the people working on all that scanning is a library assistant named Lisa Ondoy. When I dropped by the department one afternoon, Ondoy was working on indexing a picture of three kids who looked about fourteen or fifteen years old and were holding a gigantic watermelon. The scan of the picture was up on her computer screen, and Ondoy examined it for a few minutes, craning her neck so she could see every detail. She typed “teenagers” and “San Fernando Valley” as tags, leaned back in her chair, and thought for a moment. “I’ll probably tag it with ‘watermelons,’ too,” she said. “There must have been a heat wave here in 1960, because there are lots of stories about what people in the valley were doing to beat the heat.”
Ondoy had been working on creating search tools—the descriptive tags—for the Valley Times archives for two years. She had already completed the tags for 18,500 pictures. She said if she worked carefully, she could finish three or four pictures an hour. The job seems exacting and somewhat tedious, but Ondoy loves it. “I’m a total geek about it,” she said. “I love when I find things in the pictures that I thought had disappeared. Forgotten things. Maybe this is corny, but I almost feel like I’m saving them.” She said she loved how the Valley Times photos documented ordinary life. “We get a lot of birthday cake pictures and a lot of golden anniversary pictures,” she said, and she beamed, adding, “I really love those.”
She typed in a few more tags for the watermelon picture, filed it, and called up the next photograph in her queue, which showed a huge, wiry Airedale dog getting a shampoo. Ondoy said the Valley Times archives included a lot of dog pictures, and those included a lot of dogs having baths. As she was telling me this, she typed in the tags “dogs,” “grooming,” “baths,” and “San Fernando Valley.” She zoomed in on the picture and studied it. She point
ed out that a pile of towels was just visible in the corner of the frame, so she added “towels.” She also added “lawns,” because the dog’s bathtub was sitting on a large patch of grass, and according to Ondoy, people often search for photographs of lawns, so she likes to tag those generously. Another frequent search term is “swimming pools,” so any picture that features even a pixel of pool is tagged just in case. We spent some time discussing whether the plastic tub the Airedale was sitting in would qualify as a pool, but Ondoy decided against it. She filed the Airedale photograph and moved on.
The next photograph was a portrait of a priest who was smiling broadly. He had his arms around a neatly dressed man and woman who were also smiling but not quite as much. The picture had run in the Valley Times in 1961 with the caption “Father Collins Signs Couple for Counseling.” Lisa scrolled down to read the story, which discussed the rate of divorce in Los Angeles—it was the highest in the United States at the time—and the Catholic Church’s efforts to remedy it. Ondoy tagged the picture of the smiling Father Collins (“Catholic Church”; “priest”; “divorce”) and pulled up one more picture to work on before she left for her break. It was another dog. She zoomed in to examine the picture. This dog was not having a bath. It was very dry and had long wavy fur. The photo caption read, “Big Soft Friend.”