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(4.08) | 176 | Susan Orlean re-opens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, and delivers a dazzling love letter to the beloved institution of libraries. |
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 Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. ▾Converses (Enllaços) No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. » Mira també 176 mencions ▾Relacions entre sèries i obres
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Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. | |
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Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. | |
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Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. | |
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| Premis i honors |
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. | |
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Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. Memory believes before knowing remembers.
---William Faulkner, Light in August  And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering.
---Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
---Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers | |
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| Dedicatòria |
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. For Edith Orlean, my past
For Austin Gillespie, my future | |
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Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry Peak attracted attention. | |
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Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès. Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua. A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press---a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten---that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death. It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived. Pigeons the color of concrete marched in a bossy staccato around the suitcases. There was a sense of stage business—that churn of activity you can't hear or see but you feel at a theater in the instant before the curtain rises—of people finding their places and things being set right, before the burst of action begins. I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way. Together we waited as the librarian at the counter pulled out the date card and stamped it with the checkout machine—that giant fist thumping the card with a loud chunk-chunk, printing a crooked due date underneath a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times. Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs. It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever. I asked whether there would soon be library honey. Szabo said the project was likely to rise or fall on the question of whether it would serve the public good, as so many matters in the library do, but in the meantime, he was reading up on urban beekeeping. The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don't charge any money for that warm embrace. The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited. Ever since, the old one, which had served the neighborhood for sixty-five years, has stood empty, settling into dereliction like an old dog settling onto a shabby couch. The boarded-up windows look like punched-out eyes in a blank face. Abandoned buildings have a quaking, aching emptiness deeper than the emptiness of a building that has never been filled up. This building was full of what it was missing. It was as if the people who passed through had left a small indent in the air: Their absence was present, it lingered. The kid who learned to read her; the student who wrote a term paper here; the bookworm who wandered happily through these shelves: all gone, gone, gone. A few books were still on the shelves—books that had mysteriously been overlooked when the place was cleared out, like survivors of a neutron bomb. They made the ones that were missing have a slippery, hinted-at presence, as if I were seeing ghosts. 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. He kept repeating the story, adjusting it a touch each time, as if he were a tailor working on a jacket, taking in a bit of fabric here, letting out a seam there, then stepping back to consider what fit best. By then, the city was a throbbing, thriving place, growing so fast that it erased and rewrote itself by the minute. The expansion of the city was so rapid that it was unnerving. It had a quality of metastasis. Book circulation in the Los Angeles system doubled and then tripled. In 1921, more than three million books were checked out—about a thousand books an hour. During lunch hour, businessmen lined up against the walls, elbow to elbow, pinstripes to bow ties, flipping through journals and books. In the year leading up to Prohibition, when the ban on alcohol seemed inevitable, every book about how to make liquor at home was checked out, and most were never returned. People searching for missing loved ones sometimes scribbled messages in library books with the hope that the person they were looking for would see the message—as if the library had become a public broadcast system, a volley of calls and wished-for responses. Page margins were dappled with penciled pleas tossed into the wide-open sea of the library. Los Angeles looked nothing like the old cities of the Midwest or the East, and its shape was spun out as if it had been created by centrifugal force rather than emerging from a hard center. In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question. As the investigation into the library fire zeroed in on him, Harry started rewriting his story over and over, each iteration a little askew from the one that preceded it. It was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book, taking a different path at each juncture. The only suspect who resonated with the investigators was Harry, but the evidence against him was like mercury: slippery, shape-changing, inconstant. "The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion." I stepped into another portal to the future when I visited Cleveland recently and toured the headquarters of OverDrive, which is the largest digital content catalog for libraries and schools in the world. The number is growing so fast that when I visited its headquarters, OverDrive had thirty-seven thousand member libraries and just a month later, when I called to confirm the number, it had risen by over eight percent. It might have seemed like a wild idea when it started, but within three years of its founding, OverDrive had loaned one million books, and in 2012, it had reached a hundred million checkouts. By the end of 2017, it had reached the milestone of having loaned one billion books. On an average day, seven hundred thousand books are checked out through OverDrive. The company has been so successful that, a few years ago, the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten paid $410 million to acquire it. Perhaps in the future, OverDrive will be where our books will come from, and libraries will become something more like our town squares, a place that is home when you aren't at home. Every time I thought I'd settled on the version of the story I trusted, something arose to punch a hole in it, and I was back at the beginning. In the end, I had no idea what was true or even what I decided to believe. I finally accepted the ambiguity. I knew for sure that once upon a time, the Los Angeles Central Library suffered a terrible fire, and a fumbling young man was caught up in it. Beyond that was all uncertainty, the life almost always is. It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen. | |
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▾Referències Referències a aquesta obra en fonts externes.  Wikipedia en anglès
No n'hi ha cap ▾Descripcions del llibre Susan Orlean re-opens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, and delivers a dazzling love letter to the beloved institution of libraries. ▾Descripcions provinents de biblioteques No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. ▾Descripció dels membres de LibraryThing |
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4
Orlean does a fantastic job relating the fire and the devastating nature of the aftermath. I don't think most people realize how many patrons rely on a library in so many ways. The Central library had an astounding number of people who used it on a daily basis in 1986 and it still does today. The history of the library was fascinating and discovering that there were women head librarians in the mid 1800s was a nice surprise. I was just as enthralled learning about all the programs and areas that the library has now. A visit to such a great place would be wonderful. (