The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  After the stock market crash, book circulation rose by sixty percent, and the number of patrons almost doubled. According to the Los Angeles Times, many of these patrons had been “disgorged from flophouses.” In the meantime, as tax receipts dwindled, the library’s budget was cut by almost a quarter. Perry was determined to make the library just as effective as it had been with more money and fewer customers. He instructed his staff to cull books that seemed superfluous, including “books on spiritualism. Books on bridge. Cheap humor. Genteel poetry. [Books on] astrology, numerology, palmistry, fortune-telling.” He published lists of recommended reading, which revealed the anxieties and preoccupations of the time. In 1928, one reading list called “The Jew in the Literature of the Last Decade” included books such as You Gentiles; I am a Woman and a Jew; and Twenty Years on Broadway. In 1931, under the title “The Unemployment Dilemma,” the books recommended by Perry included Layoff and Its Prevention; What’s Wrong with Unemployment Insurance?; and Responsible Drinking. The 1932 list included Is Capitalism Doomed? and an exhaustive inventory of books about war. People wanted so much from the library. They wanted it to solve things for them. They wanted the library to fix them and teach them how to fix their lives.

  In a peculiar case of counterprogramming, when many Americans didn’t have work, CBS Radio launched a show called Americans at Work, a series of radio plays about different professions. There were episodes about toymakers, dynamiters, turkey farmers, and pineapple growers. One episode was about librarians. As the play begins, a young girl named Helen announces to her parents and her uncle that she plans to become a librarian.

  MOTHER. Helen, it’s ridiculous to think of your wanting to become a librarian. Why, that’s just work for older ladies who need to help out a little bit.

  HELEN. That’s the whole trouble. That’s what YOU think it is, and you don’t know anything about it. I love books and I’d like to help other people love them.

  FATHER, to Mother. That’s what you get for letting the child keep her nose in books all the time. Girls shouldn’t be bothered with book learning.

  HELEN. Oh, Dad—how can you say such old-fashioned things! I do want to be a librarian, really I do. What do YOU say, Uncle Ned?

  NED, kindly, gently. I say if the girl wants to be a librarian, let her. You know, times have changed. From what I can see, a librarian’s got to be a right modern smart girl nowadays.

  Men had been in charge of the Los Angeles Public Library since 1905, when Charles Lummis toppled Mary Jones in the Great Library War. At that time, about eighty percent of all American librarians were male. Within a few years, thanks in part to Andrew Carnegie’s efforts, the gender balance in the profession teeter-tottered, and the number of male librarians dropped to twenty percent. Most women were employed as staff librarians and clerks, and they never advanced into management. Everett Perry’s deputy director, however, was a woman named Althea Warren. She was an exception among female librarians, having previously held an administrative position as the head of the San Diego library system. Warren was from a wealthy, intellectual Chicago family. Her grandfather was a federal judge. She began her library career in her hometown, choosing to work at a branch in the poorest neighborhood in the city. While she ran the library system in San Diego, she also took care of her mother, who struggled with severe depression. In 1925, when her mother’s illness became extreme, Warren decided to take a leave from the San Diego library. She bought a duplex near Pasadena and lived in one side of it and installed her mother and her mother’s nurse in the other side. But her reputation was so outstanding that when Everett Perry heard she was in the Los Angeles area, he persisted until he convinced her to become his second-in-command.

  Warren was big, with a strong chin and wild, wavy hair that she wore bunched up in a mess of a topknot. She had a good sense of humor; people liked being around her. She often described herself as an old maid, but in fact, soon after she began her job at the Los Angeles Public Library, she fell in love with the head of the Children’s Department, a woman named Gladys English. In 1931, Warren and English moved in together and remained inseparable until English died in 1956.

  Everett Perry’s tenure began at a time when the Los Angeles Public Library was in its last days as a small operation squeezed into a rental space—when it was still a relic of the earliest version of Los Angeles, an outpost in the dust of the Southwest. Los Angeles was not a place you associated with books: It was a noisy gathering of pioneers figuring out how to prosper in its hopscotch of valleys and hills. The city and the library changed dramatically in those years. Perry was a link between the library’s past and future. He championed Bertram Goodhue, so he is responsible for what the library looks like today. After the great excitement of guiding the library into its first permanent home, Perry was forced to navigate the first jolts of the Depression. He was steady and solid, even in the terrible upheaval of those years, but he was not a charismatic leader. Some of his predecessors outshone him; Charles Lummis, for instance, was an electrifying presence that glowed and sputtered in equal measure. Everett Perry was just what the library board had noted when he was first interviewed. He was “all business,” “doesn’t talk much,” a man made of granite. But he loved the library, and the library staff and patrons loved him. In August 1933, Perry suffered a heart attack. At first he seemed to be recovering, but three months later, he died. The library staff was shattered. Perry would have been pleased to know that Althea Warren was appointed to take his place.

  Warren was probably the most avid reader who ever ran the library. She believed librarians’ single greatest responsibility was to read voraciously. Perhaps she advocated this in order to be sure librarians knew their books, but for Warren, this directive was based in emotion and philosophy: She wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite. As she said in a speech to a library association in 1935, librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.” Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets—“Althea’s Ways to Achieve Reading”—to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity to read. “The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you’re afraid she’ll catch it,” she wrote in one of her tip sheets. “Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor.” She was a reading evangelizer. She constantly looked for new ways to get books into the hands of the public. For instance, she thought it far too restrictive that children had to be in third grade or above to get library cards, so she opened library membership to any child who could sign his or her name.

  Warren inherited a withered budget and a public who wanted more from the library all the time. Los Angeles in 1933 was only the fifth largest U.S. city, but the library circulated more books than any library in the country. To economize, Warren took measures that pained her. She cut back on hours when the library was open; she didn’t replace staff who resigned; she closed some of the little book kiosks in hospitals and shopping areas; and she limited purchases of new books. She also was forced to shut down the library school that Tessa Kelso had established.

  From left to right: City librarians Mary Jones, Mary Foy, Harriet Wadleigh, and Althea Warren

  But she expanded services as much as she could when she could afford to. She established an advice line that parents could call to inquire if a particular movie was appropriate for children. (The staff invented their own rating system, which included such categories as “this movie would not be suitable for nervous children.”) She expanded the main information desk. She also added a phone-in reference service. The reference service was extremely popular, and it was used in way
s that no one at the library anticipated. So many people called for help solving crossword puzzles that Warren finally forbade the librarians to answer those requests, because they hardly had time to answer non-crossword questions. In 1937, as part of a study of the Reference Department, the library compiled a list of what callers were asking, which included:

  What Romeo looked like

  Amount of milk produced in the U.S. in 1929

  Negro slave writings of literary value

  Statistics on the sterilization of human beings

  Number of radios in Los Angeles

  Type of work done in institutions for the feeble-minded

  Number of Jewish families in Glendale

  Burial customs in Hawaii

  Average length of human life

  Whether immortality can be perceived in the iris of the eye

  One very hot Saturday afternoon in April 1940, sitting alone in her office, Althea Warren typed a letter addressed to “The City Librarian of Los Angeles on December 7, 1972” that she wanted opened by the future city librarian on what would be the hundredth anniversary of the library. She thought it would be interesting to leave a message, like a time capsule, for her successor. “You may be amused to know my troubles and hopes in your office thirty-two years ago,” she began. “Thirty-two-year-old troubles are almost sure to be amusing.” Warren mentioned that if by chance she were still alive when the letter was opened, she would be eighty-five years old, which at that time must have seemed nearly immortal. She wrote about how difficult it had been for her to inherit the library from the venerable Everett Perry, and how she felt like a “soft and shaking poplar tree” compared to Perry’s “hard, primeval oak.” She wrote about the contrast between the 1920s, when the library budget was lavish, and the cold shock of the stock market crash, when she was forced to cut salaries of library workers three times and could barely afford to order new books. The letter is by turns jolly and aching, full of the sober realization that because of her constrained budget, she was doomed to disappoint both her staff and the public. The public got less from the library than they wanted, and her staff was more aggrieved than she wished. She rued that she spent so much of her time on small matters—deciding whether to buy a new thermostat for the furnace in the San Pedro branch, finding money in the budget to buy paper towels for the washrooms—when what she hoped was to create a utopia of libraries across the city, staffed by librarians who were satisfied and proud.

  The letter was also optimistic. It was clear that Warren believed the library would endure. She signed off, “My heart is with your work and you!” The letter sat in the office of the city librarian until its designated date, when it was opened and read by Wyman Jones.

  In 1941, the United States entered World War II, and the library adapted. The one-ton chandelier in the rotunda was lowered to the floor in case explosions shook the building, and it stayed on the floor until 1944. To comply with efforts to darken downtown buildings at night, Warren announced that the library would close at sunset. But so many war workers asked to use the library at night that she reverted to original hours and even added later nights. To fulfill the municipal lights-out policy, she outfitted the library’s windows with blackout curtains. Libraries throughout the city offered first-aid classes and sold war bonds. They distributed government information leaflets at the new defense information desk. Central Library’s collection of international science material, including patent information from Germany and Italy, was especially large and was one of the few such collections on the West Coast. The army and navy consulted it regularly in an effort to understand what the Axis had in its arsenal.

  Once American troops were sent overseas, reference librarians began receiving a new kind of call. Soldiers weren’t permitted to say exactly where they were deployed, so they often put clues in their letters home, hoping to tip off their families as to where they were. The families, in turn, called the library for help deciphering. As one reference librarian noted, “We would be asked things like, ‘Where in the world do men wear their hair brushed up straight?’ or ‘Where do people have rings in their noses?’ or ‘In which country do women wear full skirts and white aprons?’ ”

  Late that year, Warren took a four-month leave of absence from the library to run the Victory Book Campaign, a nationwide drive to gather books for army reading rooms, military hospitals, and training camps. She appointed a director for the drive in each state and coordinated press releases and radio spots to encourage people to bring books to collection points. She enlisted the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to go door-to-door asking for books. By March 1942, the Victory Book Campaign had amassed more than six million books and begun distributing them to troops across the country and overseas—at the exact moment when the libraries of Europe were burning. That year, President Roosevelt gave the keynote at the American Library Association’s convention. “Books cannot be killed by fire,” he declared. “People die, but books never die.”

  When the war ended, modern Los Angeles began. The bean fields and orange groves were plowed under and replanted with three-bedroom bungalows. Waves of soldiers returned, followed by waves of families who came to be near the burst of aircraft factories and electronic plants and oil drills. This was when Harry Peak’s family pulled up stakes in Missouri and headed west, leaving their farm for the fresh chance that California seemed to offer. Los Angeles bulged and boomed, spread and stretched. If you were away for a few days, you might not recognize your neighborhood when you got back; such was the speed of growth. The library could hardly keep up. There were new communities asking for library branches in areas that had been nothing but tomato plants just a moment earlier, but there was no money to build them.

  Warren led the library through the Depression, the war, and those first tumultuous postwar years, and in 1947, she decided she wanted to finally take the break she had planned before Everett Perry had lured her to the job. She was feted and celebrated before she left. She received hundreds of letters from appreciative patrons, including one from Aldous Huxley, a frequent library visitor, who wrote, “[I] must take the present opportunity of telling you how good I find the service at the library and what a sound selection of books you have built up.”

  Warren’s successor was Harold Hamill, a young man with big ears and tufty blond hair and a second-cousin resemblance to Gunsmoke’s James Arness. Hamill, whose previous job was heading the library system in Kansas City, was a modernist. It was the perfect moment for someone forward-thinking to run the library, since technology was emerging, and uses for it in libraries were being invented all the time. Hamill embraced the innovations. He introduced a book checkout system called “photo-lending” that used micro-cameras to snap a picture of the book being borrowed; he also established an Audio-Visual Department, a first for the Los Angeles system, and began adding microfilm and microfiche to the library’s collection.

  In October 1957, the first Russian Sputnik orbited the earth. In November, the second Sputnik, carrying the space dog Laika, was sent into space. That same year, a German astronomer published a definitive catalog of planets and stars. Four out of the five Nobel Prize laureates in Physics and Chemistry that year were from countries other than the United States. Americans were terrified that the country was falling behind in math and science, so nationwide there was a renewed commitment to education, especially in those fields. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the following year, the Los Angeles library loaned out more books than it had in decades, and the city’s voters supported a $6 million bond issue to build twenty-eight new branch libraries.

  Who was patronizing the library in 1957? A report from the time noted “an increase of use by professional artists and designers . . . FOREIGN DEPARTMENT: Displaced persons program has brought large number of Latvian, Lithuanian, Jewish, German, Russian people.” The way the city had evolved was especially apparent in the makeup of visitors to the Science Department. No one asked for books on citrus or avocado farming anymore. While they
were in great demand in the 1930s, books on how to prospect for gold now idled on the shelves. Instead, patrons wanted guides to prospecting for uranium, how to build computers, how to invent and patent new products. That year’s recommended reading was a list of titles about atomic power. According to the department report, “The ‘man on the street’ as well as the specialist has an interest in science today.” By 1960, though, the popularity of science books was matched by interest in books that offered what the librarians nicknamed “the cult of reassurance”—books about positive psychology, occultism, witchcraft, Dianetics, and Nostradamus.

  A stand-alone children’s department had been part of Central Library since the Goodhue Building was built. Until 1968, though, there hadn’t been a department for teenagers. The concept that the years between twelve and nineteen form a distinct phase of life barely existed until the 1960s. By 1968, the library had acknowledged the existence of teenagers. The new Teen Department provided books and also hosted events—folk sing-alongs, judo classes, rock concerts—in hopes of attracting young people to the library and making it feel like a community center more than just a book depository. After a time, sing-alongs gave way to the less innocent aspects of teenage life, and the department began offering programs on sexuality, suicide, drug abuse, gangs, and runaways.

  19.

  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Parenting a Teenager (1996)

  By Kelly, Kate

  370.16 K29

  Su hijo adolescente: Cómo comprenderlo y relacionarse con él (1989)