Reading room in the rotunda, Library of Congress, ca. 1900. The New York Public Library, public domain
Simon & Schuster
The Library Book
A fire, a library, and what a city keeps.
$30.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Susan Orlean
- Publisher
- Simon & Schuster
- Published
- January 2018
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
What Burned in Los Angeles
On the morning of 29 April 1986 fire moved through Los Angeles Central Library for seven hours, destroying some four hundred thousand books and damaging hundreds of thousands more, the worst library fire in American history and, arriving the week of Chernobyl, one of the least remembered. Susan Orlean begins with the blaze and the strange case of Harry Peak, the aspiring actor accused of setting it and never convicted, and follows every thread outward.
The book that results, published in 2018, is part detective story, part history of Los Angeles told through its library, and part love letter to the public library as an institution, the one place a city keeps that asks nothing of anyone who walks in. Orlean, a New Yorker writer of long standing, makes the case that what burned belonged to everyone, which is why the story still smoulders.
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