I
In 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the monumental expansion of the public library was inaugurated in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where we were living at the time. The old building was converted into a functional, labyrinthine mass of glass, steel, and concrete that cost about $50 million. Half of that money was taken from taxpayers by raising property taxes. The other half came from a private fundraising campaign.
I visited that library many times before and after its renovation. They opened a fairly large bookstore—called Friends of the Library Bookstore—with very low prices, a practice I also see in Houston libraries, although paradoxically, given that this is such a huge city, the spaces are very small, sometimes just a single shelf.
Despite the large investment made, there were never many people visiting the new library in Fayetteville. With these venues, there is the contradiction that one is grateful for the low turnout because whatever you are going to do, you will do it in a perfect environment of silence and solitude, two conditions that a reader always appreciates. But I do remember reading on social media that some people were very unhappy with the decision to raise taxes to build something that was not only frequented by very few people, but was also oversized for the size of the town.
I have never been a big fan of public libraries myself, but I did frequent university libraries during my years in College Station and then at the University of Arkansas, before they began to be emptied and refounded as something more like a social club with lots of ergonomic furniture but few books. The truth is that, for some time now, I have thought of libraries much more in the private sphere, which is why I have embarked on the overwhelming task of maintaining one that already exceeds five thousand volumes.
Newly arrived back in Houston, Martha and I went to the downtown central library, an old building that looks like a brutalist concrete box that the architect forgot to add a single window to. We had already heard rumors that the place was taken over daily by groups of homeless people who live in the area. Indeed, the reading rooms and hallways were full of them, charging their phones and using the computers. The stench was quite unbearable, so we registered, got our library cards, I took a quick look at the Spanish shelves (I took a copy of La Revolución cubana explicada a los taxistas [The Cuban Revolution Explained to Taxi Drivers] by José Manuel Prieto) and we left. I have never been back.
Lately, when I’ve visited other libraries a little closer to home, I’ve noticed that they no longer have internet service, which I imagine is a way (or so I suspect) of driving the homeless out of them. It’s a bit depressing to visit a library because some of them can seem like lifeless, desolate spaces, perpetually on edge in case they hear the news that they’re going to be closed or there will be further funding cuts.
II
I’ve told you all this because one of the books I read shortly before returning to Houston was by Susan Orlean (Planeta/Temas de Hoy, 2019). If every book worth its salt has to have a crime, in this case it is the fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, one of the city’s landmark buildings, on April 29, 1986. Neither the causes nor the perpetrator of the fire were ever clarified. It also made me question the police’s versions of the allegedly arson fires and how, thanks to erroneous rulings, innocent people have been sent to their deaths, as was the case with Texan Todd Willingham.
But the book is much more than that. The History of a Library is an inquiry into the formation of a community of readers. Borges said that the “Wild West” was an invention of New England writers. This book corroborates the birth of a place for entertainment in which a life of books could not be left out.
What is the future of libraries? This is the question that arises on every page. This is a good examination of the contemporary idea that is taking shape around the function of libraries and how the transformation into something that goes beyond a repository of printed volumes for consultation and reading is not new, but was already in the minds of some since the late 19th century.
The author seems quite convinced that the community character of libraries is undermined if only people who live on the streets go there and that the challenge of keeping them open despite all the drawbacks is real. I quote in full the paragraph she devotes to the issue of homeless and violent people who go to libraries:
The library’s commitment to opening its doors to everyone is a major challenge. For many people, the library may be the only place where they encounter people with mental health issues or who are very dirty, and that can be uncomfortable. But a library cannot become the institution we hope it will be unless everyone has access to it. A few years ago, I attended an international conference on the future of libraries, and everyone—librarians from Germany, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Colombia, and everywhere else in the world—took it for granted that the challenge libraries faced with regard to the homeless was exasperating, intractable, and unsolvable. The public can come and go from libraries, but librarians spend all day there, and part of their job is to deal with difficult, sometimes even violent, people on a daily basis. The issue goes beyond the scope of libraries; it is a problem that society must solve. All libraries can do is try to cope with it as best they can. The NBC investigation did not at any point blame libraries for being a magnet for the city’s most troubled people. Most commentators blamed the police for not being more vigilant and severe. In response to the NBC report, someone wrote: “This ‘investigative’ report only proves that homeless people are a problem. It is not clear what libraries should do about it.”
The author defends the idea that libraries should not lose their founding essence, which is to move us among books and promote reading. She knows that the prevailing idea continues to be to turn these spaces into multifunctional centers for access to information, the internet, culture, certain social activism, etc.
I cannot imagine what the end of libraries will be, nor what economic logic will one day decree their definitive closure. I believe that for every library that opens, many new readers are added to the world. Perhaps I am adding too much hope to a more pragmatic and therefore poorer, more suicidal reality. Pliny the Younger recounted that, in the midst of the eruption of Vesuvius, he began to read Titus Livius in the courtyard of his villa in Miseno while debris fell around him, until someone came to rescue him from the danger of being crushed to death. Many readers probably died under the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but I have thought that a single reader immersed in his own library somewhere in the raging city vindicates them all.
III
NOTES FROM A NIGHT READER
The first library in Los Angeles opened in 1844, when a social club called Friends of the Country created a reading room in its ballroom. It closed when the club went into debt. The main book collections in Southern California at that time were in the Spanish missions that were still active.
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In 1872, an association was created with the goal of founding a library for the city. The association developed a plan to carry out fundraising activities. One of the members donated space within a building he owned.
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The L.A. Public Library opened to the public in January 1873. Membership cost $5 a year, which was quite a lot of money at the time. The rules were strict: no hats were allowed, and it was suggested that members not read too many novels, “unless they were not afraid of becoming what the Association classified as ‘demons of fiction.’” Books considered “of dubious morality” and those that were poorly written or of low quality were excluded. Women were not allowed access to the main facilities, but shortly afterwards a ladies’ room with a selection of magazines was added. Children were not allowed to enter. Chess and checkers games were organized in the reading room.
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Tessa Kelso took over as director of the Library in 1889. She was a journalist from Ohio. She was described as an “unconventional” woman. She believed that the library was boring and needed to be modernized. She abolished the membership fee and the number of members grew exponentially. She opened access to most of the shelves and allowed children over the age of twelve to enter as long as they had a high grade point average. She created a kind of storage room for tennis rackets. She believed that the library could be more than just a repository for books, so she proposed that the library offer extra services such as board games and tennis racket loans. She also founded a school for librarians with high academic standards.
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In those early years, several diseases were circulating (smallpox, typhus, influenza), and some people were concerned that books and library rooms would become agents of contagion. If someone shared a book knowing that a family member was infected, they were committing a crime, according to the authorities.
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Kelso was replaced by Mary Jones, the first person to hold the position with a degree in library science. She had managed libraries in Illinois and Nebraska. She lowered the age of admission for children to 10.
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At some point in the history of American libraries, a telephone consultation program was created whereby people could call in to ask any question they could think of, from scientific and religious matters to the weather forecast, a kind of Google forty years ahead of its time. This book collects some of the most bizarre questions they were asked.
Some names that appear in the history of the Los Angeles Public Library and beyond:
Charles Lummis replaced Mary Jones in 1905 as librarian after several decades of female leadership. He was an interesting and unorthodox character. When he was appointed, he walked from Cincinnati to L.A.
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C.J.K. Jones was nicknamed “The Human Encyclopedia.” He embodied the ideal type of librarian who knows almost everything, unlike others who were more inclined toward innovation or good administration. He worked in Lummis’ shadow until Lummis was dismissed.
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The city’s first librarian was John Littlefield, appointed in 1872. He held the position for six years and was succeeded by an alcoholic painter named Patrick Connolly, who lasted barely a year. He was replaced by Mary Foy, the first woman to head a library in the entire country.
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At that time, women were not allowed to obtain a library card and only had access to the ladies’ room. Foy was an austere and efficient administrator.
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At one point in his life, billionaire Andrew Carnegie donated a large sum of money to expand the network of public libraries throughout the United States. He built 1,700 libraries—it is said that there were a total of 2,500 worldwide—in more than 1,000 communities between 1886 and 1909. Only two states did not have one: Alaska and Delaware. Thanks to his philanthropic vision, libraries no longer required membership fees. During my years in Arkansas, I visited the one built in Eureka Springs a couple of times, a sober stone building at the foot of the mountains among mansions of various architectural styles.
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A book about a library fire opens this reflection on the transformation and challenges of public libraries.
Cover image: Carnegie Library in Eureka Springs. Inside image: LA Library.
