The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  17.

  Toward a Literate World (1938)

  By Laubach, Frank Charles

  379.2 L366

  Teaching the World to Read: A Handbook for Literacy Campaigns (1947)

  By Laubach, Frank Charles

  379.2 L366-2

  Toward World Literacy: The Each One Teach One Way (1960)

  By Laubach, Frank Charles

  379.2 L366-4

  Apostle to the Illiterates: Chapters in the Life of Frank C. Laubach (1966)

  By Mason, David E.

  379.2 L366Ma

  I joined a conversation class in the Literacy Center. The teacher had a name that sounded Norwegian. The students went around the room introducing themselves and identified themselves as Korean, Chinese, Mexican, Ecuadoran, Taiwanese, Salvadoran, and Thai. The class began with an animated debate about the longest word in the English language. The teacher, Jorgen Olson, said the word was “antidisestablishmentarianism,” but I wasn’t sure that was true, having lost this argument myself in the past. As long words go, though, it would do. When Olson said the word, drawing it out deliciously, everyone but the Thai woman started laughing, and for the next few minutes, all the students in the room gave the word a spin. Olson then moved on to the next lesson. He pointed at the whiteboard behind him, where he had written CONFUSING WORDS in gigantic block letters. The first example he listed was the dreadful trio of “latter,” “later,” and “ladder.” It was easy to take care of “ladder,” but “latter” and “later” were a doozy, and even after many minutes of having their differences explained and examples given, “latter” and “later” were still hanging people up. Olson said he’d review them again later, and we moved on to something equally confusing, the words “confident” and “confidante” and “confessor.”

  Between confusing words, the students told me their professions. They included housekeeper, dishwasher, computer repair worker, architect, student, and manicurist. One was youngish and a few were oldish, but most were sort of middle-aged. The class was being held during the school day, so there wasn’t anyone younger than eighteen. The students were friendly and relaxed with one another. Some of the friendliest pairs of people in the room shared just a few words of a common language. Still, they managed the chummy ease of neighbors or coworkers. Outside of this room, there was a good chance they never would have met. When Olson had them practice out loud, they made outrageous goofs and mispronunciations without self-consciousness, and even the most fumbled efforts were cheered on by the other students, which seemed very touching to me. The conversation classes do have specific lesson plans, but they also function as an opportunity to practice talking in a setting where it doesn’t matter if you have a faltering grasp of English or a heavy accent. “How was your weekend, Tina?” the Taiwanese architect asked the manicurist. He spoke formally, inching cautiously over the word “weekend.” The manicurist, who was from El Salvador, beamed at him and said, “Okay.” Then she started giggling and said, “I only say ‘Okay’ because I don’t know how to say more.”

  Olson tapped the chalkboard and said, “Folks, here are a few more new ones I’d like you to try. Listen up. ‘Shard.’ ‘Implicit.’ ‘Convulsive.’ Again, ‘shard, implicit, convulsive.’ ” A look of despair rippled through the room.

  Like the people in the conversation class, about seventy percent of the library system’s literacy students are people who are not native English speakers. The rest are native English speakers who read only at a third-grade level or never learned to read at all. Central Library has the largest literacy center in the system, but twenty other branches around the city have centers, too. They are run by the library and staffed by a group of almost six hundred volunteers.

  The conversation class at the Central Library was held in a conference room in the Literacy Center, which is bland and beige, with the sanitized featurelessness of an orthodontist’s office. I stepped out of the conference room while the conversation class wrestled with “convulsive,” and I crossed into the main area, which has a few sofas and a few desks and several tutors on duty. I sat down next to Carlos Nuñez, a tutor who teaches a few of the conversation classes and spends the rest of his time meeting one on one with anyone who drops in needing help. He also has a few regular students he tutors weekly. Nuñez used to work at a call center, but then he injured his back and ended up on disability. He tried lazing off at home, but he was bored out of his mind and started shopping compulsively on QVC. He also ate a lot. That was when he decided he had to get out of the house. He liked the idea of being a volunteer, so on a whim, he called the library and offered himself. He now has pupils from France, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, China, and even Galápagos. (“Can you believe that?” he said, raising his eyebrows in an admiring salute to Galápagos.) He has helped people understand their phone bills and school notices and tax forms. He has read personal letters to people who don’t know how to read. Sometimes he’s helped them write replies. He works two hours every week with a young man named Victor who was born in Mexico but was raised in Los Angeles and wants to apply for U.S. citizenship. Nuñez did all this while seated at a small desk arrayed with The Civics and Citizenship Toolkit, a few literacy guides, and a recent copy of Brides magazine.

  Victor was planning to come in that afternoon, so Nuñez stacked up some citizenship materials to be ready for him. As he was squaring up the stack, a young woman with long thick hair walked into the center, signed in, and then approached Nuñez. She told him that she was writing a research paper on Ernest Hemingway and didn’t understand a sentence in some material she’d found. Her accent was rounded and musical, perhaps Caribbean. She took out a photocopy of the page in question. Nuñez read it and then explained it to her while she scribbled notes. After she left, an older Asian man appeared at Nuñez’s desk and asked him what a sausage roll was. Nuñez was stumped. A few minutes later, a lanky, muscular young man wearing a Pep Boys jacket sat down at Nuñez’s desk. Nuñez introduced him as Victor. He greeted me and then told Nuñez that he had been practicing since their last session and thought he had mastered the material.

  Nuñez began quizzing him: “What did Susan B. Anthony do? Name a war in the 1900s. What is the supreme law of the land?” The questions were challenging. Earlier, Nuñez told me that Victor suffered amnesia because of an accident at his job, so he sometimes struggled to remember answers. This day, though, he got almost all the questions right. When he wasn’t immediately ready with the answer, he prompted himself by punching his fist into his hand, as if softening up a catcher’s mitt. When they finished, Nuñez complimented him, and then Victor said he wanted to do it one more time. Nuñez began again. “What did Susan B. Anthony do? Name a war in the 1900s. What is the supreme law of the land?”

  18.

  Fishbourne: A Roman Palace and Its Garden (1971)

  By Cunliffe, Barry W.

  Series: New Aspects of Antiquity

  942.25 C972

  Occult Theocrasy (1968)

  By Queenborough, Edith Starr Miller Paget

  366 Q3

  Lucy Gayheart (1935)

  By Cather, Willa

  Laika the Space Dog: First Hero in Outer Space (2015)

  By Wittrock, Jeni

  X 636 W832

  After shaking off the shock of Goodhue’s death, his associate Carlton Winslow assured the city that he could finish the drawings and keep the project on schedule. Privately, Goodhue’s team was shattered. Lawrie and Goodhue had been friends for thirty years. Before he returned to his work on the library, Lawrie devised a tomb for Goodhue decorated with carvings of his most important buildings, beneath a Latin inscription that read, “He touched nothing which he did not adorn.” (The tomb is in New York City’s Church of the Intercession, the first church Goodhue designed.) Lawrie also decided to include Goodhue on the facade of the Los Angeles library: he is above the building’s southeast entrance, in a frieze alongside other luminaries in the world of typography and printing, including Johannes Gutenberg
and William Caxton, the man who brought the first printing press to England. In the sculpture, Goodhue is sitting at a drafting table, leaning forward, eyes cast down, as if he is about to begin drawing.

  On May 3, 1925, the library’s cornerstone was laid. The concrete pour for the huge rotunda took twenty-one hours. At the time, it was the largest concrete pour in the city’s history. The rotunda’s chandelier, a massive bronze and glass representation of the earth and solar system, weighed one ton and proved so cumbersome to manage that winches were installed in the tower so the chandelier could be raised and lowered for cleaning. Some of the building’s interiors were plain stucco. Other sections were loaded with ornament and artwork that took another several years to complete. There were sculptures on the banisters, sculptures in niches, and sculptures gazing down from the ceiling. Two huge black marble sphinxes flanked a main stairwell. In one alcove was the library’s symbol—a sculpture of a torch known as the Light of Learning, which was repeated in a much enlarged size on top of the pyramid tower. In another alcove was a life-size figure of a goddess with colorless eyes and an imperious expression, known as the Statue of Civilization. The building had fifteen reading rooms arranged along its perimeter, and miles of open shelving, but the majority of the books were stored in four concrete silos, seven stories high, in the interior of the building. The shelves in the concrete stacks were made of steel grating that was touted as fire- and earthquake-resistant.

  Goodhue 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. Even the garden was part of his plan. He called for it to be planted with olive trees, cypress, viburnum, and magnolia, all plants that might have been found in a classic Roman garden, which he felt would continue the experience of intellectual immersion. Among the trees were a variety of sculptures, including a fountain decorated with images of the great writers of the world, which was called the Well of the Scribes.

  In June 1926, the building was completed, and on July 15, 1926, the new home of the Los Angeles library officially opened. Initial reaction to the building was praiseful but complicated. “This building comes as a distinct shock,” wrote critic Merrell Gage in Artland News. “Like all creative art, it is disturbing: it leaves an impression that is satisfying yet mystifying. It follows no accepted order of architecture but through it strains of the Spanish, of the East, of the modern European, come and go like folk songs in a great symphony rising to new and undreamt-of heights in an order truly American in spirit.” Another writer described the building as being “as frank and open and honest as the eye of a little child. It looks one in the face and knows no fear or shame. It has nothing to explain and need make no apologies.”

  The globe chandelier in the Central Library rotunda

  The dedication-day ceremony was a spectacle. More than one thousand children in costumes paraded around the building, led by a man dressed as the Pied Piper. Visitors mobbed the place. There was an air of elation, as if the library were not just a new municipal property but also a civic achievement, a communal wish that actually materialized. A pamphlet called “Like Stepping into a Story Book,” distributed on opening day, captured the excited tone: “A magic castle in fairyland! Rich, beautiful colors. Exquisite harmony of outline. An idyllic setting. A perpetual joy to behold . . . the mind of the visitor is attuned to the message of the poet, the prophet, the philosopher, the artist, the scientist . . . A story book building come true . . . because here is the home of our oldest and best friends—Books.” The only objection to the new building came from a small group of people who maintained that the triangles and torch imagery in the library’s design denoted something sinister. They insisted that Goodhue must have been a devil worshipper or a Freemason because he used Satan’s symbols, and the library was an occult shrine. Their concerns were dismissed, but even today, a website called the Vigilant Citizen persists in making this claim.

  The head of the library board was a local attorney named Orra Monnette, whose family became wealthy in 1906, when his father struck a vein of gold worth the equivalent of $131 million. Ordinarily, Monnette was soft-spoken and reserved, with country-club manners, but the new library moved him so deeply that his dedication address sounded like he was speaking in tongues. The text of his address was published later and formatted like poetry:

  Life’s players and actors present the following themes:

  The Deepest Truths Which are the Hidden Mysteries of Life:

  Man’s Tragic Existence;

  Urge of Keen Desire;

  Hopes and Vanities;

  Manifest Destiny;

  Ages That Are Past;

  Outline of History;

  Life’s Unwearied Travelers;

  Toilers of Earth and Sea;

  None Again Pass This Way;

  And, these read like the Table of Contents to a Great Book and that Book is the “BOOK OF LIFE”—written by a Master Playwright, GOD! To the user, to the reader, to the student, to the scholar, in your study of this majestic play, this inspirational Book of Life, the Los Angeles Public Library is your exalted opportunity.

  People surged in after opening day. Some came with trouble in mind. Book thieves prowled, snatching what they could. A few enterprising con artists used the library to flesh out elaborate schemes. In one swindle, they posed as travel agents, using brochures they’d created by cutting pictures of exotic places out of library books to advertise trips that would never take place. The outbreak of criminality in the library was so alarming that a 1926 editorial complained, “Not only book thieves but other criminals infest the library. They are not readers, nor book borrowers, but come to talk over things and to lay plans for crimes, or to sell morphine, by appointment.” At the end of the year, library security reported they had apprehended 57 “mutilators of books”; 105 people who had written in books; 73 who engaged in general bad behavior; 23 forgers; 8 people who were caught hiding books; and 10 who had switched their books’ due dates. Sixty-three of the offenders were prosecuted, and six were “judged to have diseased brains” and sent for psychiatric treatment.

  The new building wasn’t completely finished. The rotunda was bare, and it took painter Dean Cornwell six years to complete the murals. Cornwell was a showman who worked out of John Singer Sargent’s former studio in London, hired beauty pageant contestants to model for him, and suspended himself from enormous scaffolding while painting, which drew spellbound crowds. At the time, his nine-thousand-square-foot canvas was the largest such mural ever hung.

  Library school had not prepared Everett Perry for his new role as steward of a significant piece of architecture with countless sculptures and carvings and fixtures and fountains. Sometimes he worried about them. In 1930, he wrote to sculptor Lee Lawrie for advice. “Dear Mr. Lawrie, Have you any instructions to give us as to the care and cleaning of the two Sphinxes and the Statue of Civilization?” his letter began. “I haven’t the remotest idea of what should be done, if anything, but I imagine no water should be used.” (Lawrie replied that Civilization required occasional dusting with a dry cloth.)

  In the meantime, Perry still had to oversee the usual business of the library. Charles Lummis had urged his librarians to pounce on patrons. Perry instructed his staff to develop gentler habits, such as “Respect every request. Don’t forget how to smile. Avoid snobbishness.” He devised new notices for people who forgot to pay their overdue fines. The notices bore his genteel tone: “Dear [blank], A fine of [blank] is charged against your card, which has probably escaped your memory. Will you kindly call . . . within the next few days to clear this record? Very truly yours, Los Angeles Public Library.” The fines were humane, ranging from one cent for a soiled page to a nickel for overdue books. But if you drew in ink in a book or, worse, chewed on it—“chewed book” was an actual line item in Perry’s list of violations—you had to pay to replace it. If you developed diphtheria, spotted f
ever, or the plague while you were in possession of a library book, you were required to inform the library, and the book had to be fumigated before it was put back in circulation, but the library covered the cost.

  Three years after the glorious moment of the library’s opening, the stock market buckled, and the Great Depression began. The crash came at what had been a proud and elevating time in Los Angeles: The city was galloping, growing, road-building, house-plotting, skyscraping. Its mainstays—movies and oil and airplanes—were strapping young industries that gave the city the luster of newness and youth and seemed immune to the sickness in the economy. But the sickness spread, and it came to Los Angeles, taking down businesses and factories and banks. Tens of thousands of migrants arrived in the city from the Midwest, where their farms had turned to powder after years of drought and deep plowing. Before heading to California, they watched their planting fields in Oklahoma and Kansas blow away in dry gray clouds that darkened skies as far away as New York City.

  Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home with you for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in. Or you might come to the library and something remarkable would happen, like, say, the day in 1938 when poet Carl Sandburg dropped by the children’s story hour and played guitar and talked about Paul Bunyan. But overall, it was a time of sorrow and desperation, no matter what the library offered. On New Year’s Eve in 1932, a man named Charles Munger threw himself into the pond in the library garden in an attempt to commit suicide.