[inaudible conversations] please welcome dr. Carla hayden and susan orlean. [applaus [applause] well, i have to start by, im carla Hayden Library of congress and i want to thank jamie and feline and the angels and the readers for allowing me to be with someone who hassle evaluat evaluated elevated libraries to such an extent. Thank you. Let me say there have been patron saints of libraries, Andrew Carnegie and stuff like that, about you you are now number one. I finally smacked down Andrew Carnegie. You have. Thats great. How does it feel to be the patron saint of librarians . When i started this book, i couldnt have anticipated that 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 l. A. Library for several years, but more importantly, i wanted to understand why i cared about it so much. I ive often said to me if city hall burned down, i would have thought thats too bad and i assume theyll rebuild it. But hearing that a library had burned felt like this deep profoundly personal loss and i thought, why, why do we feel such a connection to books . Why do we feel such a connection to libraries that the idea of one burning is so disturbing . So that this combination of both just the investigative curiosity of who started the Largest Library fire in american history, coupled with this overarcing question of why do we care so much about libraries and i think that that 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, this thing that i am most interested in is taking something that seems ordinary and noticing how extraordinary it really is. So libraries are the perhaps perfect example of something that is ordinary in the sense of we all know what libraries are. Weve all spent lots of time in libraries. Everybody grew up with a library, but this gave me a chance to say, stop and think for a minute how extraordinary it is that these places exist. I think about how extraordinary, i got a chance to tour this library and aaron, the director and his staff, and what they do here and observatory. This is the only library in the country that has an observatory. Thats free programming, free tell us, its like being at the addler sanitarium, not the sanitarium. Talk about that. When libraries are in sanitariums a part of the planetarium and this library exemplifies everything that you were talking about that libraries do and there was connection to this library with your book. This is an interesting little side fact, 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 tealman, 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 poetic moment to be back here talking about the book, when in a sense, i really began the book here. I made a little reference to a sanitarium. You discovered 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 me 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 peake, the young man accused of having started the fire, who is one very particular kind of character, a very l. A. Character who embodied the this whole sort of aspirational mythic caught of l. A. That draws people, who believes at any moment they will discover celebrity. And be elevated to fame and fortune. He moved to l. A. , dreaming of becoming an actor. Discovered soon into his attempt to be an actor 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 corner he turned, somebody would discover him and hed 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 l. A. Library and its history was interesting, and i thought this would be a short paragraph. 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. [laughter] the world of people who live in l. A. Is perhaps skewed to the unusual. [laughter] so the ven diagram of people who run the l. A. Library is doubly determined to be slightly unusual and when i dove into the stories of the people who run the libraries, 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 the one of the first people to run the library who was a 17yearold girl at a time when women were not permitted to use the library. She was head of the library. You had mary jones, who was the first trained librarian to run the l. A. Library and who was, you know, very, very important figure and this was turn of the century. 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 refused to cede power. Eventually the City Attorney intervened and although before this happened, thousands of women gathered in los angeles and marched in defense of her and was known as the Great Library war. [applause] and she finally left, you know, 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 esteemable charles lumis. Now, he had been a journalist living in cincinnati, had been hired by the l. A. Times. He then packed up and walked to l. A. From cincinnati, as one does. [laughter] how long did that take . It was a couple of months. He arrived in l. A. As a huge celebrity, people met him along the way, cheering him on. So he was a bit of a showboat you might say. He had no training as a librarian, but he was an intellectual. He was a writer. And he really truly loved the library. He was a bit of an unusual man. He believed he did not believe in censorship, but he felt very strongly that people shouldnt road books that he thought were stupid, but rather than removing those books from the collection, he had a branding iron made with the skull and crossbones, and he branded the books that he thought were particularly stupid and put a book mark in them saying there are far better books on this topic. Is there are temptations to do that. Oh, i there are. [laughter] but you cant be judgmental, just 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, you know, there was a point where i was writing about charles lumis and got so engaged in his story and by the way, one other thing, which is 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 of these different assignations. To keep it straight. To keep straight who he had told what to, and he kept the diary in spanish, you know, just as a way of kind of covering up. Keep it from his wife. Well, his wife read spanish, was fluent in spanish. So they had one of the most public divorces in l. A. 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 and 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. My libraries until that time were meant with served educated people to help them become more educated and his feeling was, no, libraries are meant to lift everyone and he promoted the library to factories, to railroad companies, saying, have your workers come to the library. They can better themselves. And this was very radical. Its his spirit that really transformed the l. A. Library and remains true to this day. I mean, we only have a few of his branded books, but we certainly have the spirit. Now, on the other hand, you have harry, who is an aspiring actor. What was he doing in the library . Looking for plays . What was he doing . Its unclear. I mean, this is really interesting to remember that in 1986 there were no security cameras. There was no record of who came in and out of the library. There was no way of knowing if he really was even in the library. I mean, we 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 good i should say his dear friend said to me, you know, i dont personally remember ever seeing harry read a book, but there is also the fact that he worked as a messenger. He was 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 very broke. 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, so you have his stories woven into this because he fabricated . Yes, he was an incredible fabulist. Part of it was harmless, he made up stories about everything. And one thing realizing as i was working on this, was 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 this young man at the center of this crime story be in his own way an extravagant story teller, felt like it had a great deal of resonance 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 book . Most people would say, oh, like you said, a book about a library. Right. And you know, the writing i became so passionate about this, this subject. I felt like every aspect of it fascinated me. The science of how in the fire, 400,000 books were completely destroyed, but 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 just fascinating to read about this effort. It was the largest book recovery effort ever undertaken. And the largest fire. 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 deny meltdown at Chernobyl Nuclear plant. Same day. The same day through, you know, the accident of fate, this story, which certainly would have gotten more attention and i was living in new york at the time, so thats why i looked at the New York Times because i thought, i cant believe the New York Times wouldnt cover this. Its maybe not the a1 headline, but i was sure that it would have gotten attention and suddenly understood why. The paper the front section of the paper was almost entirely devoted to chernobyl and there was a story in the asection toward the back about the fire. But it was just fate that this story i even know people who lived in l. A. At the time who have said to me, i dont understand how i never knew about this. It was the largest fire in l. A. At the time . Until they recently was the largest structure fire in l. A. History and thats saying something because there are a lot of fires in l. A. , unfortunately, and it remains, and with luck, 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 certainly in the course of, particularly world 2, there were entire libraries where the contents were burned and the building destroyed. So there are precedents, sadly, through i mean, weve burned libraries since we built libraries. And why do you think . Some were accidents and some were intentional . Many were intentional and that goes back to my original impulse for doing this book, which is theyve been burned because we care about them so deeply. The nazis had had a commandos unit that were called the bren 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 memory, 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 strive. 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 burned 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 destroying 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 from 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 facts that i learned is one of the worlds great book burners was matsa dunn and began was a librarian. He knew the power. Exactly, he knew how powerful books are and he knew in the effort to reinvent Chinese Society that books had to be destroyed and clean the slate. Alberto manguel in the book history reading has a chapter on forbidden reading. Oh, really . And he says as slave owners dictators and other illicit holders of power have known, the easiest group of people to rule is the illiterate and if you cannot prevent people from learning to read, you destroy the books. And its interesting because libraries are so in the present day more than ever, really make literacy a huge part of their mission because and again, this is an interesting evolution, from libraries basically being Gentlemen Club for educated men, then it evolved by the way, i find it so funny that i was astonished to learn that for many, many, many years children were not allowed in libraries. Then children 15 years old and older could come. Then children 12 years old who had a certain grade point average. Then, you know, i mean, 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 loose with babies and people reading. Yeah, i mean, they have stro stroller jams at the library. The library were telling about their childrens room and there are times when you have a traffic jam of strollers. Yeah, i love it. And it does seem so funny to look back in the history of this institution and realize that there was a point where the idea that children would be in there was just but weve embraced literacy, you know, 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. Now, you were surprised at some of the activities that libraries are doing. This library does so many things and types of programming and things like that and you were finding that when you looked at what was going on in l. A. And other libraries, that yoga classes. And you know, one of my favorite things was when there was this oil spill in porter ranch, which is, i believe, Ventura County and people were evaluated for a very long time and the library became the Community Center and the librarians knew how stressful it was for people to be evaluated and have nowhere, you know, that didnt know when they would get back into their homes. So the library started offering yoga classes and 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, you know, wow, i love going to the dmv. [laughter] and, but theyre doing better. Yes, yeah, i dont think it its nice. But we feel this tremendous sense of i think that 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 provide it 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 mention the stage craft of preparing for the Library Doors to open. It was like being at a theater, you said. I spent a lot of mornings going down to the Library Early before it opened and you know, 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 l. A. 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. So, i spent time in every department of the library and of course, realizing that librarians dont come at 10 a. M. When the library opens, but they come earlier and get things r