by Susan Orlean
Lummis changed the Los Angeles Public Library forever. He made it more democratic and yet more sophisticated; more substantial, more accessible, more celebrated. At the same time, he offended people and spent too much money and became much too famous for his personal travails. Finally, his friends on the library board forsook him, and at the end of 1910, he was pressured to leave. Even the Human Encyclopedia, whom he had defended to his detriment, abandoned him: As soon as Lummis announced his resignation, Dr. C. J. K. Jones applied for his job.
The dismissal from the library stung Lummis. “You will remember I was not a Sweet Girl Graduate of a Library School,” he wrote later to Isidore Dockweiler. “I was a Scholar and Frontiersman and a Two-fisted He-Person and that I went to the roots of that Sissy Library and made it, within two years, an Institution of Character, a He-Library, of which we were all proud.” To his friends, Lummis pretended that leaving the library was a happy turn of events. He said he was tired of the job, that it had “absorbed all there was of me,” and that it had “wasted” six years which he could have devoted to writing his own books. “I feel pretty good,” he wrote in his diary after his firing. “After a little while I will be able to build the house and get out-door exercise . . . and finish up my books and write new ones and write articles and . . . restore the missions which need it pretty bad . . . I have also a suspicion that I will get up and catch a trout this spring the first time in many years . . . It will seem fine when I don’t have to bother about anything in the library and do as I please.” He embarked on a program of self-improvement. He quit drinking, smoking, and swearing. He tried to bring some semblance of order to his life, which was the usual mess; he had no money, a divorce to finalize, and several books he had promised to write; and he somehow managed to have two lovers living with him at El Alisal.
The end of his time at the library was the beginning of the end of his life. He never again displayed the bluster and confidence that had propelled him three thousand miles on foot across America, and to the jungles of Central America, and to the tribal towns of the Southwest—all those journeys of energy and curiosity that had made his life so singular and inspired. In 1911, he did travel on an archaeological trip to Guatemala, but while he was there, he contracted a fever that left him totally blind. He managed to continue writing by relying on a rotating crew of secretaries, some of whom were also his rotating lovers. He even continued taking photographs. He accomplished this by having his son Quimu describe the scene and guide his camera. Some of his friends doubted he was really blind. After so many years of hearing Lummis’s dramatic stories, they never quite believed him anymore. In fact, in 1912, he announced that his sight had miraculously returned, which convinced many of his friends that it had been a charade all along.
The big swashbuckling life Lummis had fashioned for himself began to contract. He was forced out of the Southwest Museum, which he had founded. His writing, which used to come so easily to him, stalled. The books he hoped to work on didn’t materialize. He started writing a column for the Los Angeles Times, but after just a short run, the paper dropped it. In 1915, Lummis got some good news. The king of Spain was knighting him in appreciation of all he had done to honor the Spanish contributions to American culture. In a sense, it was a vindication of his life’s work, and Lummis wore the emblem of the knighthood around his neck for the rest of his days. Unfortunately, it did little to steady his life. He was nearly bankrupt. He begged Isidore Dockweiler to help him find a civil service job; he said he was willing to take anything in any department and that he rather liked the idea of doing physical labor. He told Dockweiler he was sure his writing would bring him income soon, but in the meantime, he needed to eat. Dockweiler never responded.
Somehow Lummis scraped by. He still threw the occasional party at El Alisal. He married one more time. He took one more trip to the dry adobe villages of the Southwest that he loved so much. He wrote in his diary of the trip, of the dreamlike landscapes there, of the red mountains and wild valleys, the rumbling herds of antelope, the clouds scudding along the flat horizon. These were the landscapes he had first encountered in 1884 as a young man walking across the country, when these landscapes were as untouched as the moon, and his melancholy made it seem that he knew they would never be as pure again. But for that moment, on that last trip, it was as if New Mexico were still ancient and unspoiled, and he was a young man again, fearless, no longer tired, not lonely, still full of ambitions that most people would have thought impossible or insane, and still convinced he would see them all to completion. When he returned to Los Angeles, a lump he had thought was an infected insect bite was diagnosed as cancer. As he was dying, he wrote two more books—a collection of poems called A Bronco Pegasus, and a collection of essays called Flowers of Our Lost Romance. He lived long enough to see the first copies of A Bronco Pegasus delivered to El Alisal, and to learn that Flowers of Our Lost Romance had been accepted for publication. Perhaps he imagined he would have one more spin through the world, but late in the evening of November 25, 1928, Charles Fletcher Lummis died. Currently, the Los Angeles Public Library has his library reports; his journals; his coverage of the Apache Wars; his Birch Bark Poems; his books about the Spanish missions, Pueblo Indians, Moqui Indians, and the history of Mexico; and the book Letters from the Southwest, September 20, 1884, to March 14, 1885, the collection of the columns he wrote while on his glorious tramp across the country.
14.
Wasa-Wasa: A Tale of Trails and Treasure in the Far North (1951)
By Macfie, Harry
971.05 M144
Map Librarianship: An Introduction (1987)
By Larsgaard, Mary Lynette
025.176 L334
Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding (2014)
Series: Treatments That Work
By Tolin, David F.
616.8522 T649
Genealogy, and Enjoying It (1982)
By Coleman, Ruby Roberts
929.01 C692-1
History is on the lowest floor of the library and occupies the largest space of any department, stretching from the bottom of the escalator across the width of the building’s new wing. Glen Creason, one of the department’s senior librarians, entered library school in 1979 on a whim, thinking it would be a good place to meet attractive women. That year, the head of the RAND Corporation announced that libraries would soon be obsolete. Creason is now the longest-tenured librarian at Central Library. He has a scramble of blondish-white hair with unruly bangs, a scrubby beard, and a body like an exclamation point. He likes pretending to be stern and cynical, perhaps to hide the fact that he is a softie and deeply sentimental. He has waxed nostalgic about such things as the days when the library had a switchboard, operated by an elegant lady named Pearl; when material was moved from department to department via pneumatic tubes; the days when one addressed librarians as “Mrs.” or “Miss” or, on that rare occasion, “Mr.”; the days when a librarian named Tom Owens walked five miles to and from work every day; when Creason would have lunch with a clerk named Ted Itagaki, who “could swallow an entire hamburger in three bites.” He has waxed less nostalgic about the days after the fire, when he was overcome by despair. That was when he was working in the library’s temporary location on Spring Street and hypodermic needles would fall off the shelves as he was putting books away. Over the years, he has become a sort of library himself: He is the repository of endless stories about the library’s most interesting patrons. One that he described to me, for instance, was a former math teacher from Wisconsin who had a nervous breakdown and ended up in Los Angeles; he spent almost every day in the History Department, reading or cutting his hair over the wastebasket, and sometimes making announcements to the librarians like “I walked from Racine to Sheboygan in the dead of winter. Froze my penis and my nipples,” before returning to his hair cutting or his books. Or the octogenarian twins—Creason and his colleagues referred to them as Heckle and Jeckle—who came to the library
daily, spending their time reading Herodotus and Thucydides and telling Creason the very same joke every day for seven years. Or the patron who claimed he was the sultan of Brunei (he wasn’t) and insisted that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage at the exact minute when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Over the months I spent with him, Creason told me stories about Rubber Man and Antler Man and Stopwatch Man and Stampy and General Hershey Bar and his sidekick, Colonel Dismay, and someone Creason had nicknamed the Prospector, who wore gold-digging clothes and always requested Buried Treasure magazine. Creason’s stories about patrons are bemused and mostly fond. The first time he and I met, he described, with no cynicism, an attractively dressed woman who came to the desk one day and told him she had been in the Atlantic Ocean since 1912, then had turned into a seal and swum to the port of Los Angeles.
Creason’s tenure at Central Library has spanned the fire; the AIDS crisis, which killed eleven librarians; the reopening of the building; the library’s adjustment to omnipresent Internet; his divorce, which he blames partly on his depression after the fire; and the addition of his daughter Katya to the library staff. They are one of many parent-child duos on staff in the L.A. system. Creason has helped historians Will and Ariel Durant find books. He also waited on a patron named Richard Ramirez, who was looking for books on torture and astrology. (It turned out that Ramirez was the serial killer known as the Night Stalker and was sentenced to death for thirteen murders in Los Angeles. “He was definitely really creepy,” Creason says.) Bobby Fischer, the chess master, used to come to the History Department regularly, carrying a heavy brown suitcase, but he generally kept to himself. Sometimes Creason makes noises about retiring, but it’s hard to picture him anywhere other than behind a library desk—with the exception of a Dodgers game. He seems like a librarian through and through when he says things like “When the library reopened, we were so happy to see our books again!”
One Saturday morning, Creason called and said he had someone he wanted me to meet. It was drowsy in the department when I arrived. A few people were seated at the desks, thumbing through books. One woman at a table in a far corner of the room was putting polish on her toenails. I walked around the department’s information desk and past a cart marked DISCARD. The casualties included a biography of Billy Carter; The Vital Records of Franklin, Maine; and a stained and tattered copy of a book of folk tales titled Wasa-Wasa, translated from the original Swedish. The History Department is a bit of a portmanteau; it encompasses all of the library’s history materials, as well as the very popular Genealogy Department, and the library’s map collection, one of the five largest in the United States. The map collection has grown exponentially since it was established at the founding of the library. The only significant subtraction has been the closing of the Army Map Room, which existed during World War II as a repository of official army service maps and charts.
Creason is the senior librarian in charge of the Map Department. When I tracked him down that morning, he was standing with three other people near the flat files where the most valuable maps are stored. One of them—a bouncy, bowlegged man with a brushy white mustache who introduced himself as Brian Hatcher—was a map collector with a specialty in maps printed by the Automobile Club of Southern California. That day, Hatcher had three bins full of assorted maps to donate to the library. He said he wasn’t happy about doing it, but his wife had demanded that he start culling his collection or she’d do it for him.
Next to Hatcher stood a young man wearing thick glasses, hearing aids, and a sweet, distracted look on his face. “This is C.J., the person I wanted you to meet,” Creason said, motioning to the young man. “He’s here to work on the maps.” The other man in the group was C.J.’s father, John Moon. John told me that C.J. was deaf and autistic, and that he was fascinated by maps and had an extraordinary knowledge of them. C.J.’s focus on maps started early. When he was five years old, his Christmas wish list consisted of just one thing: a Thomas Guide, which is one of those spiral-bound block-by-block atlases of metropolitan areas, favored by taxi drivers and real estate agents. C.J. didn’t want just any Thomas Guide—he wanted a 1974 edition of the San Bernardino Thomas Guide. By the time he was eleven years old, C.J. was probably one of the world’s experts on Thomas Guides. While his father was telling me this, C.J. was studying the shelves of maps. He suddenly turned to me and asked my home address. After I told him, he stood for a moment with his eyes closed, then announced what page my house was on in the Los Angeles Thomas Guide. Creason found the guide on the shelf, and we turned to the page, just to check. My street was right in the center of the page.
C.J. and Hatcher had met on a map-collector website and decided to get together today; it was the first time they’d met in real life. The Map Department was a natural rendezvous. C.J. is a regular at the library. He and his father travel the hour from their home to Central at least once a month. “This is C.J.’s paradise,” John said, circling his arm over his head. “This is his world.”
Glen Creason with one of the library’s many maps
For the last year, C.J. has been helping Creason index a group of maps and atlases called the Feathers Collection. John Feathers was a shy hospital dietician with a cleft palate and a dislike of mingling. In his fifties, he found happiness at last with an older man named Walter Keller. He moved into Keller’s house, a cottage in an isolated corner of a Los Angeles neighborhood called Mount Washington, next door to the headquarters of the Self-Realization Fellowship. What Feathers did in his spare time was collect maps. He gathered tract maps and pictorial maps and topographic studies; city plans and touring guides and road maps published by State Farm and Rand McNally and Hagstrom; sportsmen’s atlases; strip maps; geologic surveys. He gathered an almost complete set of Thomas Guides, including the first four ever published, as well as an almost complete set of the Thomas competitor, the Renie Atlas. He had common maps and also many rare ones—special atlases from 1891 and from 1903; a map of Europe published in 1592. The cottage was tiny—not even a thousand square feet—but Feathers had managed to wedge approximately one hundred thousand maps into it, along with his collections of hotel soap and restaurant matches.
In 2012, Feathers died at the age of fifty-six. Keller had predeceased him. Ownership of the cottage passed to relatives of Keller’s, who decided to sell it as a teardown, and hired a broker named Matthew Greenberg to put it on the market. Keller and Feathers had led quiet lives in their tiny cottage. When Greenberg went to see it for the first time, he expected to find the usual backwash of lives flown by—perhaps a spare and sad-making landscape of shoes and jackets, a neglected planter, a pinned photo, a broken dish. But the Keller cottage was bursting. Every inch was jammed with Feathers’s maps, which were piled on the floor and in file boxes, stacked inside the kitchen cabinets, even stacked in the oven. A stereo system had had its guts pulled out to make space for a heap of Thomas Guides. Greenberg wasn’t sure what to make of it and had no idea whether the maps were trash or valuable, but he couldn’t bring himself to call for a Dumpster. Instead, he called the library and was connected to Glen Creason. “You should come see this,” Greenberg told him. “I have a houseful of maps.”
That night, Creason was so excited that he couldn’t sleep. When morning finally rolled in, he headed to the cottage with ten librarian friends and some empty boxes. Over the course of the day, they packed more than two hundred cartons of material. At that instant, the size of the library’s map collection doubled. The sheer bulk of the Feathers Collection is staggering. It occupies the equivalent of two football fields of shelving. The complication of this walloping find is that it arrived in a jumble, without any sort of order at all—a cardinal sin in a library, where the commitment to findability is absolute. Indexing maps is tedious and time-consuming work—exacting, eye-straining—with no margin for error. Each map has to be indexed by the name of the company that printed it, the name of the map, the year it was printed, the place it depicts, and any distinguishing features tha
t need to be noted in order to categorize it. As of the day we met, C.J. had indexed two thousand maps. He likes to do seven hours of indexing work with no lunch break when he comes to the library, but his father insists that he at least eat a sandwich. He was getting impatient to get started, so Creason walked with him through a locked door to the stacks, where the unindexed maps were kept. While we waited for them to return, his father told me, almost offhandedly, that the Moon family had a special history with the library.
“In what way?” I asked.
“You know the fire here in 1986?” John said. “C.J.’s grandfather was one of the firemen who helped put out the fire. There’s a plaque by the front door for the firefighters. You can find his name on it. Captain Howard Slaven.”
As I stood there gobsmacked by this serendipity, Creason came back from the stacks holding a map C.J. had just found between pages of a street atlas. Creason, who is a serious map aficionado and has a soft spot for pictorial maps, spread the map on the table and leaned over it, taking it in. He said “Wow” under his breath several times. Finally, he straightened up, tapped the map, and said, “This is one of those moments . . . one of those rare moments . . .” He shook his head. “I have never seen this before. I have never laid my eyes on this before.” It was a map of the 1932 Summer Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles just as the Great Depression bore down. These were the Olympics that first introduced the great athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias to the world. The map was creamy yellow and had fine-lined roads and red rectangles marking many Olympic venues in the city, including the Rose Bowl, Griffith Park, and Marine Stadium. It was evidently meant to help tourists at the Olympics find their way around the giant sprawl of Los Angeles; along the top of the map was the encouraging yet commanding phrase AVOID CONFUSION. The map had the frozen-moment quality of a snapshot. It might have stayed stuck between pages in a street atlas forever, had C.J. not come across it. Now it was found, rescued. It would be indexed and cataloged as a part of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Feathers Map Collection, one more piece of the bigger puzzle the library is always seeking to assemble—the looping, unending story of who we are.