Well, i have to start by thanking the library of congress and i want to thank jamie and helene and the angels. Readers, for allowing me to be with someone who has elevated libraries to such an extent. [applause] let me just say there have been patron saints of the library at the carnegie and thingslike that but you are now number one. I finally smacked down andrew carnegie. Like that. Greats how does itfeel to be the patron saint of libraries . When i started this book i couldnt have anticipatedthat part of it. I was drawn in to the story because i really wanted to understand what happened in 1986 that this epic fire that closed the la library for seven years but more importantly, i wanted to understand why icared about it so much. Ive often said if someone had said to me city hall burn down i would have thought thats too bad and i assume they willrebuild it , but hearing that the library had burned felt like this the, profoundly personal loss. And i thought, why do we feel such a connection to books . Why do we feel such a connection to libraries and the idea of one burning is so disturbing . So this combination of both just the investigative curiosity of who started the Largest Library fire in American History coupled with this overarching question of why do we care so much about libraries and i think thats that acknowledgment of our deep feelings about these places is what stirred a lot of people because i think for many people it was a reminder to them about how much they care about libraries. You and i were talking about this earlier. As a writer, the thing i am most interested in is taking something that seems ordinary and noticing how extraordinary it really is. So libraries are perhaps the perfect example of something that is ordinary in the sense that we all know what libraries are. Weve all spent lots of time in libraries, everybody grew up in a library but this gave me the chance to say stop and think for a minute how extraordinary it is that these places exist. To think about how extraordinary, i got a chance to tour this library and the director and his staff and what they do here. And observatory. This is the only library in the country that has and observatory. Its like being at the center, not the sanitarium,we will talk about that. When libraries have a sanitarium theyre in trouble. I found that so unique, this library exemplifies everything you were talking about that libraries do and there was a connection to this library with your books. This is an interesting little side effect which is the first time i ever came to Rancho Mirage was when i began working on this book because one of the most important sources for me was Elizabeth Tillman who, i dont know if shes here in the audience, if she is but she had been the head of Central Library at the time of the fire. And then she retired to Rancho Mirage but then her plan to retire was foiled when she was persuaded to run the Rancho Mirage library so it is really a kind of a poetic moment to be back here , talking about the book when in a sense i reallybegan the book here. I made a little reference to a sanitarium. You took over and in telling the story of this particular library you ran into quite a few characters. I did indeed and when i began the book, of course, books to the rise and fall on the strength of the human characters and simply downloading lots and lots of data about libraries would not have made this an interesting book, it really was a book that was populated literally by these characters who come from every different sort of angle of the book, there was harry p, the young man who was accused of having started the fire. Itwas one very particular kind of character, a very la character , who embodied the whole sort of aspirational myth quality of la that draws people who believe that at any moment, they will discover celebrity and be elevated to fame and fortune. He moved to la, dreaming of becoming an actor, discovered soon into his attempt to the enactor that he had terrible stage fright. But that didnt stop him in any way. And he really did believe that he was moments away, that the next quarter he turned, somebody would discover him and he would become a star. But then the unexpected characters were, i had gone into the book assuming that i would want to write little capsule descriptions of the people who had run the la library and its history seemed interesting, i thought this will be a shortparagraph. Little did i know, that actually, let me back up and say i think the world of people who run libraries is perhaps skewed to the unusual. The world of people who live in la is perhaps skewed to the unusual. So the venn diagram of people who run the la library is doubly determined to be slightly unusual. And when i dove into the stories of the people who run the library starting in the late 1800s, it was as if each one of them could have been a book. They were fascinating. They were eccentric, you had one of the first people to run the library was a 17yearold girl at a time when women were not permitted to use the library. She was the head of the library. You had mary jones who was the first trained librarian to run the la library and who was very, very important figure and this was turnofthecentury. She was deposed because she was called in by the Library Board and they said youve done a wonderful job, but wouldnt we all agree it would be better to have the library run by a man . And she said no. And this was at a time when women still didnt have the vote and she had the wherewithal to say this is absurd and we refused to see power. Eventually, the City Attorney intervened and although before this happened, thousands of women gathered in los angeles and marched in defense of her. It was known as the Great Library war. And she finally left, the City Attorney basically said you have no protection in your job and if they want to get rid of you, they can get rid of you. She was replaced by the estimable charles lummus. Charles lummus had been a journalist living in cincinnati. Had been hired by the l. A. Times. He then packed up and walked to la from cincinnati as one does. How long did that take . It was a couple of months. He arrived in la as a huge celebrity. People met him along theway cheering him on. It was a bit of a show boat, you might say. He had no training as a library abundant but he wasnt intellectual, he was a writer and he truly loved the library. He was a bit of an unusual man. He believed, he did not believe incensorship. But he felt strongly that people shouldnt read books that he thought were stupid. But rather than removing those books from the collection he had a branding iron made with a stolen crossbones and he branded the books that he thought were particularly stupid and put a bookmark in them saying there are far better books on this topic. There are temptations todo that. There are. But you cant be judgmental. And i have to say if any of you want a wonderful field trip, the library does still have in the rare book collection some of those branded books. So there was a point where i was writing about Charles Lummis and got so engaged in his story and one other thing which has nothing really to do with the library but he had a bit of a woman problem and he had dozens of extramarital affairs. He kept a diary of all these different assignations. Just to keep it straight who have he had told what to and he kept the diary in spanish. You know, just as a way of kind of keeping it away from his wife. Well, his wife read spanish. She was fluent in spanish so they had one of the most public divorces in la. I mean, divorce wasnt particularly common at that time but also this was scandalous and he had many wives over the course of his life, but he was also a brilliant man a lot of what he did, a lot of the innovations he brought to the library, but most importantly, his belief that the library was a democratic institution, libraries up until that time were really meant to serve educated people, to help them become more educated and his feeling is no, libraries are meant to lift everyone. And he promoted the library to factories, to Railroad Companies saying how your workers come to the library, they can better themselvesand this was very radical. Its his spirit that really transformed the la library and remains true to this day. We only have a few of his rented books, but we certainly have the spirit. On the other hand you have harry , who, is this aspiring actor. What was he doing in the library . Its unclear. This is really interesting to remember that in 1986, there were no security cameras. There was no record of came in and out of the library. Theres no way of knowing if he really was even in the library. I mean, when you think about crime in 19, in the 1980s and how limited we were in being able to figure out even, was he in the library that day . His former, i should say is your friend said to me i dont personally rememberever seeing harry read a book. But there is also the fact that he worked as a messenger, hewas downtown a lot. And its entirely possible that like many people downtown, the library was a place to stop and sort of collect your thoughts. Whether you were there to take a book out or not. I like to think he was reading movie magazines because he was a very, he wouldnt have been able to buy or it would have been a stretch for him to spend a lot of money on movie magazines, so he could have been in the library looking up Burt Reynolds pictures because he was, he believed himself to be a good friend of Burt Reynolds. And he told a lot of stories you have his stories moving into this because he fabricated. Yes, he was an incredible fabulist and part of this was harmless, you just made up stories about everything and what was interesting is realizing as i was working on this that libraries are about the essential human need for story. It is the essential unit of human interaction. Its the stories we tell ourselves, its the stories we share with each other. Its the stories we save and preserve and pass on. To the next generation. So having the young man at the center of this crime story be in his own way a extravagant storyteller, felt like it had a great deal of residence with the theme of the book, of this idea that our lives are all stories. So as a journalist, as an author, just how do you get the real library bug . Most people would say like you said, a book about a library. Right. And the writing, i became so passionate about this subject, i felt like every aspect of it fascinated me. The science of how in the fire, 400,000 books were completely destroyed 700,000 were damaged and frozen for years to keep them from molding until it could be figured out how to possibly preserve them. So you know, it was fascinating to read about this effort. It was the largest book recovery effort ever undertaken. And the largest fire. But it didnt get much publicity because. Of this incredible kind of coincidence of timing. I went immediately to look at the New York Times from that date because i couldnt understand how i had never heard about this fire. And i pulled up the paper for that day and the headline says soviets denied meltdown at share noble nuclear plant. The same day, through you know, the accident of faith. This story which certainly would have gotten more attention. And i was living in newyork at the time. Though thats why i looked at the New York Times. I thought i cant believethe New York Times wouldnt cover this. It maybe is not the one headline, but i was sure that it would have gotten attention. And suddenly understoodwhy. The front section of the paper was almost entirely devoted to share noble and there was a story in the a section, towards the back. About the fire. But it was just faith that this story, i even know people who live in la at the time who had said to me i dont understand how i never knew about this. It was the largest fire in la at the time. Until recently was the largest structure fire. In la history. And thats saying something because there are a lot of fires in la unfortunately. And the, it remains with and will always remain the Largest Library fire in American History. Not in the world, sadly. There have been larger library fires in the world and currently, in the course of particularly world war ii, there were entire libraries where the contents were burned and the building destroyed. So there are precedents sadly , we burned libraries since we dont libraries. Why do we think, some were accidents but some were intentional. Many were intentional goes back to my original impulse for doing this book which is a been burned because we care about them so deeply. The nazis had a Commando Unit that were called the brin commandos. They had one mission. And that was to seek out and burn libraries. It was an effort to send a message to people which is your history is going to be obliterated. Your culture will not be remembered. You will be wiped off the earths memory. You, we all think of libraries as one of the safe places, the places that are uniquely sort of removed from the world of strife. You burn down a library, you fill people with terror because youre also saying to them nowhere is safe. Youre not safe. There was an incredibly chilling remark made by a german philosopher which is where they burn books, next they burn people. And unfortunately, in the history of the world, i would say theres rarely been a regime that burned books that didnt at some point begin to destroy people. We are, books are an extension of the human spirit. They are human objects. And theyve been treated in this most horrible way. As a surrogate for people, poor memory. For information. For all of the things that we are. That makes us different from inanimate objects. And its really, you know, one of the most chilling backs i learned was one of the worlds great book burners was now they dont and he began his professional life as a librarian. He knew the power. Exactly, he knew how powerful books are area and he knew in the effort to reinvent Chinese Society that books has destroyed. And clean the slate. And birds help manwell in his history the book of reading has a chapter on for been reading. And he says his slave owners, dictators and other illicit holders of power have known, the easiest route for people to rule is the illiterate and if you cannot prevent people from learning to read you destroy books. Its interesting because libraries in the present day more than ever really make literacy a huge part of their mission because again, this is an interesting evolution that some libraries having been basically gentlemens clubs for educated men, then it evolved. By the way, i find it so funny that i was astonished to learn that for many, many years children were not allowed inlibraries. Then children 15 years old and older income. Then run 12 years old who had a certain grade pointaverage. And now we think of libraries as being , having working with children being so essential to what they do, but they werent permitted in the library. Now we have mother goose on the list with babies and people reading. A have stroller jams at the local library. Were telling me about their childrens room there aretimes when you have a traffic jam of strollers. I love it and it does team so funny to look back in the history of the institution and realize there was a point where the idea that children would be in there was just discussing but we have embraced literacy, its a natural extension of what a library is in the very best sense. And there is such a lot of outreach on that and its not just, i mean its literacy for adults as well as for children. You were surprised that some of the activities libraries are doing, this library does only things, the different types of programming and things like that and you were finding out when you look at what was going on in la and other libraries, they older classes. One of my favorite things was when there was this oil spill in porter ranch which is i believe its venture or county. And people were evacuated for a very long time. And the library became the Community Center and the librarians knew how stressful it was for people to be evacuated and have nowhere, that didnt know when they would get back into their homes. So the library started offering yoga classes and the meditation classes to help just help the general mood of the community. I loved it because you know, nobody, i mean this is probably a radical thing to say but people dont have warm Fuzzy Feelings about government. And they dont think wow, i love going to the dmv. But. Theyre doing better. Its nice. But we feel this tremendous sense of i think people do feel that libraries do, are coming from an incredibly, not only a positive place but an efficient place, that they figure out what people need and provided and there isnt a bunch of lines and red tape and bureaucracy. They see a need and they move quite quickly to fill that need. You mentioned the stagecraft of preparing for the librarydoors open. It was like being at the theater you said. Alot of morning going down to the Library Early before it opened and one of the things i wanted to do was both investigate the story of this fire, look at the whole history of libraries and the la library. Explore my own relationship to them, but then also conjure as much as i could the feeling of what is it like daytoday in the library . Though i spent time in every department of the library and of course, realizing librarians dont come at 10 am when the library opens but they come earlier and get things ready and in the meantime, there are all sorts of people waiting and very antsy to get in at 10 am and its a ritual. Everybodys sort of Milling Around and the security guards keep saying its not 10 yet, its not 10 yet and it was a wonderful feeling of this preparation. This, of this buzzing activity, preparation for the day to begin and then the doors opened and people flooded in. And the library began its daily life. And it was a wonderful thing to observe and it was so much fun for me to spend time in each department of the library and i dont mean the subject departments, the english department, science but things i didnt even know existed like the shipping department and the reference. I meant the telephone Reference Library in here and asked, people are calling you up . Oh yes. Its incredible, i had no idea as i think well, google certainly has made it you know, not necessary to call the library. The fact that people call the library all day long. All the time. And they ask questions that some of the librarians are by. They asked a lot of questions could be googled very easily. But. They want a human being to interact with. And part of the library and screed as you know is that we only ask you questions to satisfy your need. Even though we would love to know why you want the spatula and the timer. And the other thing, all they want. We really do want to know that we cant ask you why. Thats very deliberate on judgmental attitude is something pretty wonderful. I mean, i sat in the reference room and it was really funny. Ive got to admit. If you want a fun field trip, i recommend sitting in the reference room for a while because you think, why at 10 07 on a Tuesday Morning is somebody wondering what movies dana delaney has been in since 1995 . You think wow. Someone was wondering that. Right now. And wanted to get an answer from you. Writes, and the librarians are amazed, much of the time or favorite one was somebody calling and asking the reference librarian if a certain can of beans in her pantry was safe to eat. And the library and actually knew a website where you can google the identifying marks on the can find out when the food was produced. And then had another website she said to go to that said when foods become dangerous to eat. And at the same time, she was worried that she might have some legal liability if she said to the woman theyre fine. The woman ate them and got sick so it was really funny. Its also, i mean, i think we are, we have reached peak lack of human contact. And i see society moving back towards human interaction. And that is one of the ways that libraries offer a different experience than sitting at home alone and googling and im not saying if you want to, whats the capital of tennessee. You should call the library, but more generally, i think that the, i feel that weve all been saturated with online inanimate experiences. And that the place we are heading towards as a culture is one in which interaction is price and value and sought after. Erin mentioned at this library they had a Self Checkout and took it out because people didnt want to just do Self Checkout. They wanted interaction. You mentioned that the experience was similar to what you had when you investigated and look into a supermarket. This may not seem like an important interaction but there is a moment when youre checking out a book and you make eye contact with the library and exchange pleasantries, i can absolutely understand how people miss that. Its art of what they want when they are in a library is some human interaction. And i absolutely can, this is what i think of as ambient social interaction. Its the library and may not become your best friend but in the course of the day, its rather nice to have someone say oh, this is a terrific book. I just read. Check it out, done. As opposed to going and scanning and walking out of thelibrary with the book. Its a place where the automation doesnt feel necessary. And in a supermarket, when theres a long line of hundred people 7000 groceries , then you want automation. And i secretly always fantasized about being a cashier so theres part of me loves the Self Checkout at the grocery store, even though it always takes me longer. But libraries are human, they are, that is what makes them special. Course its the books. But its the human aspect of it, that has meant that they have not just endured but thrive. There was tension in terms of libraries being open for all and that means all. People who are homeless, people who are as you call them lost souls being in there. When you consider the places where we interact in a completely uncuratedway , just wide open to anyone and everything, there arent that many places. Public parks, the library , i guess the public streets. And so there is always going to be an element of tension over bringing together the greatest extremes of society. Its also the fact that i mean, that is the nature of libraries is to be open to all. When you have an issue of homelessness in our society that isnt being well addressed, the places have the flexibility to include the homeless are going to be overextended. Its not the librarys problem, its societies problem to not be providing more places that can absorb people who need a place to go and dont have anywhere to go. And lost souls who might not be homeless. They are lonely. They have a lot of time on their hands and a library is a warm embracing environment. And thank goodness that they exist cause we all have the potential to feel lost at times or simply just need somewhere to be and not be alone. I want to switch a little bit back to the impact of the fire, the hundreds of thousands of books that were destroyed. To give a sense for the people that are sitting in this room, erin, the director told me this room was filled with books sex. And on monday morning, those exact would be back. 60,000 books. Where everybodys sitting. Were removed, how many volumes again were destroyed . 400,000 were completely destroyed. 700,000 were damaged. And just as a footnote to that, of the 700,000 were damaged, the majority of those were salvaged. Which is amazing. Another fact, i was going to say another fun fact but its notfun fact , the city of los angeles had insurance on the building. But not on the books. The building did suffer some damage, but the primary loss was the books. So all the money needed to replace those 400,000 books and to prepare and hopefully salvage that 700,000 books, this is more than half of all of the books in the collection. That all had to the race. From the public. 22 million. , not a penny of insurance. I am not sure if, because ive askedinsurance people who have said well, a building is durable. Books, i didnt even know this, complete new piece of information to me is that the library buys a book and if its a popular book and get checked out a lot, it has to be replaced quickly because books eventually fall apart or they get foiled and so if you have a book like the da vinci code check out all the time, the one youre checking out his probably the hundred one that the library has owned. Its not that they buy one book and habits permanently, unless its a book that no one ever checks out area but my guess is that Insurance Companies would be very uncomfortable ensuring something that was really such a fungible commodity. But thats the well of a library or the books you mentioned summer soil, i had to share this. One library it a display on the things that are returned when books are returned. One had used very interesting things or bookmarks, a piece ofbacon. A photograph, so theres an entire department when youre checking books back in return people. Now, ive got to ask you something picking up the fire and the burning and the books and everything, you have it inthe book so this is public information. You burned a book. You became an expert in the physical fire and i discovered in reading it the fire and what types offire but you burned a book. Let me tell you the story. I have you have an excuse read it was recent research. It was research and i thought im describing the fight of 400,000 books, ive never seen a book burn. It would be useful for me to know what that looks like. But secondly and probably more importantly, i thought i logically know that if i burn a book, i can go and replace it easily. Go to the bookstore, by another copy. I am not removing from human civilization this document. So theoretically, i shouldnt find this discomfiting. I cannot bear the thought of doing it. And i thought this is almost superstitious. So i thought im going to pick a book to burn. Comeon, i can do this. I thought alberta book i dont like. Thought that seems really wrong so i thought, ill burn a book i really like and i thought im notgoing to burn a book i really like. I thought well, ill burn one of my books because i have lots of copies of my book. You mean a book that i wrote. No i mean like the orchid thief. Ive got 100 orchid thieves and ive got im not going to burn one ofmy books. Then i finally thought icant do this. I know its silly, i know its superstitious, i know it doesnt mean what it means when the nazis had book burning celebrations and i know im doing this for research but i cannot bring myself to burn a book. And i thought, im just not going to do it. One day my husband came home and he was grinning yeartoyear and he said i found a book for you to burn and he handed me a copy of their in height for 51. And i thought well, then go and theres my book. And i thought Ray Bradberry of all people would approve of this since he was writing about a society in which books were banned and if they were found they were burned. He also coincidentally didnt have the money to go to college and for his education , spent over the course of 14 years by his telling, went to the la library, the Downtown Branch every day reading his way through the library. He was passionate about the library. He loved the la library. He wrote farenheit 451 in the library. In the corner of flour and hope street in downtown la is now called the Ray Bradberry corner. He became very instrumental in raising that money to repair those destroyed books. He really, truly was, if there was a patron saint of libraries, it certainly was him and i know when i burned that book that he approved. Susan, i have to say and end by saying on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people work in libraries every day all over the world, we thank you for elevating libraries. Because it took someone with your talent to bring libraries alive in a way that we talk about them, we are librarians but you put the grace and the beauty so thank you so much. [applause] you are watching book tv on cspan2 with top four action books and authorsevery weekend. Dd television for serious readers. Okay, good evening everyone and thank you all for joining us tonight. On behalf of carmichaels bookstore i am delighted to welcome you all to tonights event. If we can all take a moment before i begin and silence are cell phones iwould greatly appreciate that. Tonight, we are joined by kathy chambers w d