Ceiling beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until at last the gazettes smoked, flared, crackled, and dematerialized. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collection stored in the northwest stacks. The fire burned through sixth-tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northwest stacks. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, then decided to move laterally. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumpled and vanished. It poked around, looking for more air and fuel.

At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroomed down again to the sixth tier. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. Here’s a snippet of how she describes the library fire: Key Ideas from The Library Book Orlean’s writing about fire is … on fire The life and times and near-death experience of the Los Angeles Public Library was a story that felt urgent to tell, and gave me a chance to pay tribute to these marvelous places that have been such an essential part of my life. The next thing I knew, I was investigating the largest library fire in the history of the United States. I never stopped loving libraries, but they receded in my mind, and seemed like a piece of my past.Īnd then I started taking my own son to the library, and I was reminded instantly and vividly of how much libraries had meant to me, how formative they were to my love of reading and writing, and how much they mean to us as a culture.

The very air in the library seemed charged with possibility and imagination books seem to have their own almost human vitality.īut over time, I had become more of a book buyer than a book borrower, and I had begun to forget how magical libraries are. My mother and I would take regular trips to the branch library near my house at least twice a week, and those trips were enchanted. She knows how to find the interesting thread in almost anything, and then bring it vivdly to life.

The library book by orlean