by Susan Orlean
The Great Library War could have continued indefinitely, since Mary Jones made it clear that she had no plans to surrender, but Mayor McAleer became so exasperated that he asked the city attorney to see if there was a legal remedy. This was sixty years before federal law prohibited job discrimination based on gender. A few days later, the city attorney announced his decision, saying that the city librarian served at will, and therefore the board had the legal right to fire her for any reason at all, including the fact that she was a woman. Jones and her supporters were outraged and continued to protest, but it became clear that the city attorney’s ruling would not be shaken loose. At last, Jones turned in her keys and left Los Angeles for good, accepting a job as the head of the library at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania. Her defeat was summed up in the Los Angeles Times with the headline SEQUEL TO LONG QUARREL OVER WHETHER MAN OR WOMAN SHALL BE IN CHARGE—ISIDORE DOCKWEILER AND “MUSHY” MILLER AT LAST GET MISS JONES’ SCALP.
As soon as Jones had vacated her office, the city’s annual report introduced the new city librarian. Lummis was “probably the best-known book-man in California . . . an author of national reputation . . . whose name is in all recent encyclopedias; a man of ripe experience as an editor, explorer, author, critic of literature and history, historian, lexicographer, organizer and director of several important utilities; a scholar and yet a practical leader.” The announcement acknowledged that Lummis “was not the product of library training school” but that his “education in books and men, his common-sense, determination and poise, and his well-known faculty for ‘getting things done,’ were believed to be far more important.”
Lummis returned from his fishing trip for his first official day on the job. He sent a memo to his staff regarding the storm that had accompanied his hiring. “Through no fault of ours, you and I are in a situation not altogether without its embarrassment,” he wrote. “Who was, could, or should be librarian is no longer our business. I am librarian—and shall be for plenty long enough for you and me to acquire the fixed habit of pulling together . . . I am going to give this library the best there is in me.” Lummis still wore his hair in the same long, flowing style that had gotten him in hot water at Harvard. He decided to mark this new beginning at the library with a haircut, which the local papers covered as if it were a major news event.
One thing you could count on with Charles Lummis was that he never did things in an ordinary way. He didn’t get to Los Angeles in an ordinary way. He didn’t conduct his personal life in an ordinary way. He did not become an ordinary librarian. He referred to his management style as “An Experiment in Democracy.” He viewed running the library as another of his grand projects, and he became obsessed with perfecting it. He fixated on details as well as the broader strokes: He worked on an ambitious plan to make the library one of the best in the world, and at the same time, he made recommendations on what his staff should eat for lunch. (He declared, “No more pickles and candy lunches for the library girls. They need three square meals eaten regularly.”)
He felt personally responsible for the intellectual health of the library’s patrons. The popularity of pseudoscience books, which he considered “not worth the match to burn them up,” worried him. Instead of removing the books from the collection, he established what he called the “Literary Pure Food Act” to warn readers about them. He hired a blacksmith to make a branding iron in the shape of a skull and crossbones—the poison warning symbol—and used it to brand the frontispiece of the offending books. He also created warning cards to insert in the questionable books. He wanted the cards to say, “This book is of the worst class that we can possibly keep in the library. We are sorry that you have not any better sense than to read it,” but he was persuaded to use a more restrained tone. The cards, shaped like bookmarks, said, “For Later and More Scientific Treatment of This Subject, Consult ______,” followed by a blank space for librarians to list better books on the topic. Lummis noted in his diary that he considered the poison-label brand one of his finest innovations at the library. He also used a branding iron to solve another problem. Many of the library’s most valuable reference books were being stolen off the shelves, so he branded them “Property of the Los Angeles Library.” Patrons complained that Lummis was defacing library property, but he was unrepentant. “We brand cows, don’t we?” he wrote in one of his annual reports. “Are our reference books less valuable?”
He loved the library, but he felt out of place among other head librarians he met at national conventions. He thought they were “pompous asses,” so he created a group he hoped would provide refuge for himself and his fellow librarian iconoclasts. He called it “The Bibliosmiles,” and it was also known as “Librarians Who Are Nevertheless Human.” One of the founding members was Tessa Kelso, who shared Lummis’s contempt for the status quo. The group’s slogan was “Cheer up, American Library Association!” Its official beverage was apricot brandy. Each member had a Bibliosmiles nickname. Lummis’s nickname was “Grim Reality.”
From the beginning, there were complaints that Lummis disappeared from the library for days at a time. He did go fishing frequently, and he spent time attending to his other projects—his books, the Southwest Museum, his continued attention to Native American issues—but much of the time he was gone from the library, he was working at El Alisal, where he sometimes spent fourteen or fifteen hours a day attending to library business. It suited him to work from home. Though he was an unconventional executive, he was passionate about the job, and much of what he did for the library made it the institution it is today. At the time he took over, the library was a good loaning library; he pushed for it to become a serious research center for scholars. He established a photography collection, a California history collection, and a Spanish history collection. He thought an autograph collection would be a great asset, so he designed special “autograph collection” stationery and wrote to all the notable people of the day—everyone from his old friend Teddy Roosevelt to William Jennings Bryan to Frederick Remington—asking for a signature and some kind of addition to the page such as a comment or a doodle. Nearly everyone he approached sent him an autograph and, in many cases, elaborate drawings. By the time he left the library in 1910, Lummis had collected 760 autographs, many with sketches and notation, from the most significant artists, writers, politicians, and scientists in the world.
When Lummis took over, the library’s shelving system was somewhat illogical. The Philosophy Department, for example, included books on palmistry, cockfighting, adultery, bicycle racing, and servant girls. Lummis reorganized the subject departments; his goal was to devise a system that would enable anyone to find anything on the shelves in under ten minutes. His ambition was to make the library completely accessible—“a workshop for scholars including every painter’s apprentice or working boy or streetcar man who wishes to learn, just as much as it includes the Greek professors or the art dilettante.” His attitude of inclusiveness was unusual for the time. He campaigned to bring in patrons who hadn’t considered using the library before. To attract them, he posted notices in schools and stores and factories, saying
Do you CARE to READ? Do you CARE to LEARN? The Los Angeles Public Library is meant FOR YOU.
The notices urged people not to be afraid of the library.
[The library] has not only the books but the people to help you find and use them. Ask in the Reference Room for what you want. If you don’t find it (and cheerful service with it) drop me a postal card . . . The more you learn, the larger salary you will command. Sincerely yours, CHAS. F. LUMMIS, Librarian.
He sent a letter to railway companies, asking them to urge their employees to join the library, because “books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”
Lummis’s efforts to attract more people was so successful that the library soon needed to find larger quarters. Most of Los Angeles’s residents had voted in favor of a library-building proposal in 1904, but the city had made no ef
fort to move forward with a plan. In 1906, Lummis signed a lease for the top floor of the Homer Laughlin Building, across the street from Angels Flight, a funicular that carried the wealthy residents of Bunker Hill down the sheer side of the hill to the central business district. The Homer Laughlin space was almost twice as large as what the library had in City Hall and could accommodate the 123,000 books that were now in the collection. To Lummis’s delight, there was also room for a smoking area and a rooftop garden. “It [will not be] a toy garden with terracotta teacup flowers, but a real garden,” he wrote, “probably the only one of its sort [in any library] in the world.”
But after just two years in the Homer Laughlin Building, the library again needed more space. It had grown exponentially: Its collection was now the sixteenth largest of any public library in the United States. It was growing at a time when Los Angeles was growing, too. In 1900, Los Angeles was the thirty-sixth largest city in the country; by 1905, it was the seventeenth largest. In 1908, Lummis signed a lease for the third floor in a building downtown that was three times bigger than the space in Homer Laughlin. The building’s chief tenant was a department store, so library patrons had to ride the elevator up through the store, with stops along the way to load and unload shoppers. The rent was exorbitant, and the terms of the lease were terrible. If anyone raised a question about renting the space, Lummis clearly ignored it. He loved the fact that it was a great location in a fine building, and the roof had a beautiful view.
One thing Lummis couldn’t abide was the thought that any of his patrons might wander around the library feeling lost. His solution was to train the staff to be aggressively useful. “Don’t wait for anyone to wake you up,” he instructed them. “Look for a chance to be helpful!” To that end, Lummis established the library’s Department of Reading, Study, and Research. The department had two full-time clerks who were assigned to “pounce”—this was Lummis’s choice of verbs—on anyone who came into the library with “an unfamiliar air and apparently not knowing where to go.” To head the new department, Lummis hired an old friend, Dr. C. J. K. Jones. Dr. Jones was a former Unitarian pastor, a member of the library board, and the owner of more than two hundred books on the cultivation of oranges, lemons, and grapefruits—in fact, Dr. Jones owned the finest private library on citrus farming in the entire state, according to a 1918 profile of him in California Citragraph Magazine. Citing Jones’s “eminent qualifications” to lead the department, without specifying what those qualifications were, Lummis allotted Jones a large salary and the title “The Human Encyclopedia.” Jones was to be “a walking information desk” who would rove around the library and provide answers to any questions the patrons might have.
Dr. C. J. K. Jones, “The Human Encyclopedia”
Dr. Jones was a large man with a pinched arc of a mouth and a trim white beard and an air of weaning self-importance. He had a habit of tapping his forehead after being asked a question, as if he had to jar the answer loose from a storage bin in his brain. There is no record of how patrons of the library felt about him, but the library staff hated him. They resented his vanity and his salary, which was nearly double the salary of senior librarians. Jones suspected that he was not well liked. He complained to Lummis that he sometimes found lemons and hammers on his desk, which he interpreted as an insult. Word of the friction between the staff and the Human Encyclopedia made its way into the news. IS THE L.A. PUBLIC LIBRARY THE HOUSE OF A THOUSAND SCANDALS? screamed one Los Angeles Times story, speculating that the highly paid Dr. Jones spent most of his time in the library’s roof garden, watering the geraniums.
Not long after the Times questioned Dr. Jones’s effectiveness as a library resource, it came to light that he had been hired without having taken the civil service test required of all library employees. When the city administration told him that he had to take the test or risk losing his job, Jones was indignant, arguing that his intellectual stature spoke for itself. The city insisted, so Jones finally submitted to the test. He flunked. Among the questions he got wrong were: “Name three children’s anthologies and describe them”; “Give a brief account of present copyright law”; and “What is meant by ‘Arthurian legends’?” According to the person who graded the test, Dr. Jones also “failed to give satisfactory replies to questions pertaining to fairy lore.” Apparently, when he was asked to list three fairy tales, Jones included Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. His modest performance on the test made front-page news. The Los Angeles Herald headline was HIGH-PRICED RESEARCH DIRECTOR FAILS TO PASS EXAMINATION.
Jones’s failure on the test and his unpopularity with the library staff reflected poorly on Lummis. But he defended Jones and explained that his knowledge was so broad that it couldn’t be adequately measured by any test. It’s hard to understand why Lummis was so determined to protect Jones; he seemed blind to the man’s inflated self-esteem and narcissism. On his second try, Jones did pass the test, so he was able to keep his job as Human Encyclopedia, but his reputation never recovered, and the local press seemed to delight in mocking him. The Times summed up the incident by writing, “The human race . . . has reason to rejoice in this, the dawn of the twentieth century, that has produced . . . and washed out upon the shores of time, Dr. C. J. K. Jones . . .”
Lummis was smart about many things. He had a knack for getting attention and a genius for getting things done that many people would have thought were impossible. He was brave. He was enterprising. He drew people to him with the sheer force of his own convictions; he was magnetic. He thrived on drama and challenge and a certain amount of chaos. When he started his job at the library, his personal life was in turmoil, and the scene at El Alisal was a circus. El Alisal was a small, rough house; Lummis and his wife and their children and his illegitimate daughter lived there, along with a family of troubadours and an endless stream of partygoers who came and went on no particular schedule. In 1907, one of the troubadours murdered one of Lummis’s housekeepers. Still, the parties continued, as many as two or three a week, one blurring into the other, with some guests who never bothered to leave. One day in 1909, Lummis’s wife, Eve, came across the diaries in which he detailed close to fifty extramarital affairs. Outraged, Eve left El Alisal and moved to San Francisco with two of their children, Turbesé and Keith. Their son Quimu stayed with Lummis. Lummis adored his children. He clung to them, especially after his oldest son, Amado, died of pneumonia at the age of six. He loved being around babies so much that he often invited pregnant women to be long-term houseguests at El Alisal, so they would stay for a while once their babies were born. When Turbesé and Keith moved to San Francisco with Eve, Lummis was devastated. Eve’s divorce filing and the details of his infidelities consumed the local media. It was the most press Lummis had ever gotten in Los Angeles, which is notable, since his life had drawn media attention since the day he arrived.
As brilliant as he was, Lummis had no instinct for self-preservation. As when he was working at the Los Angeles Times—when losing his job had come as such a surprise to him—he never considered that his behavior or the controversy that buzzed around him might compromise his position at the library. He lived on bullheadedness, self-involvement, and a daredevil’s willful obliviousness. He was proud of the new space in the Hamburger Department Store Building but failed to appreciate that signing an unfavorable lease would be held against him. The board recognized that he had improved the library’s collection and that he had attracted vast numbers of new patrons. But his transgressions were equally recognized. He was away from the library almost eighty days in 1907, for instance, and he charged his cigars to his library expense account. Hiring Dr. Jones without the necessary testing made him appear careless. In the end, his loyalty to Dr. Jones didn’t even pay him dividends as a friend. It was Jones who first broadcast that Lummis was frequently absent from the library: He mentioned it when he gave testimony in a lawsuit brought by a clerk who claimed the library was being mismanaged.
Lummis’s annual written reports t
o the library board were not the usual tallying and tedium; they were anecdotal and discursive, full of pronouncements on the state of libraries and the city and life, and often included long, elaborate descriptions of other city libraries he visited around the United States. He took great pleasure in writing the reports. He divided them into sections with titles like “The Battle of the Shelves” and “Beans When the Bag Is Open” and “What Are We Here For?” The reports sometimes ran longer than 120 pages. To head librarians around the country, Lummis’s reports became legendary, and they often requested copies so they could read and then pass them around to their staff. Because of the reports, Lummis was perhaps the best-known librarian in the United States.
But after five years of reading Lummis’s reports, the Los Angeles library commissioners no longer found them charming, and they reprimanded him for his verbosity and flamboyance. Lummis ignored their criticism, attributing it to petty politicking. The library board was indeed political. One of its newest members was a woman named Shelly Tollhurst, who had been an active supporter of Mary Jones in the Great Library War. Lummis treated the board as a necessary annoyance. “The library is a magnificent institution which nothing can hinder . . . except peanut politics,” Lummis complained to the mayor, citing “the inability of certain good people to understand the responsibilities and the functions of a great public library.”