The idea began with an interview. Susan Orlean’s then 6-year-old son had a school assignment to interview a city employee in their new hometown of Los Angeles.

A boy after his mother’s own heart, he chose a librarian. As the pair walked through the doors of a nearby branch library, Orlean, the famed author of The Orchid Thief, was overcome by what she calls “a Proustian kind of moment” filled with memories of countless childhood visits to the library in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her mother, who worked in a bank but frequently declared that she would’ve loved to have been a librarian.

Now, years later, that moment has come full circle with the publication of Orlean’s spellbinding love letter to this beloved institution, The Library Book, dedicated to her son (now a teenager) and late mother, who died from dementia as Orlean wrote her tribute.

“I got very emotional, thinking, these are amazing places and my association with them is so profound,” Orlean recalls, speaking by phone from Banff, Canada. “I love writing about places that I feel that I know very well but have never really examined. The library was exactly that sort of place.”

Nonetheless, when she casually mentioned to her publisher that she would enjoy spending a year in a library to see what goes on, she knew some sort of essential ingredient was missing from her pitch. “It felt a bit amorphous. I loved the idea of it, but it had a little bit of a saggy-baggy feel, and it didn’t quite create a narrative.”

“I love writing about places that I feel that I know very well but have never really examined. The library was exactly that sort of place.”

It wasn’t long before Orlean discovered—quite literally—the spark to enliven her account. She was invited on a personal tour of the Los Angeles Central Library, and at one point her librarian guide cracked open a book, held it to his face and “inhaled deeply,” saying, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.”

Orlean was puzzled, asking if patrons had been allowed to smoke in the building in the past. The librarian shot her a wary look, then proceeded to tell her about a disastrous fire that consumed the building on April 29, 1986, reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and burning for more than seven hours, destroying or damaging more than a million books. Miraculously, there were no fatalities.

“I just about fell off my chair,” Orlean says. “It was such an amazingly interesting and complicated story, and it provided me with this other narrative thread to take me through this bigger story of writing about libraries in general.” Adding to the narrative appeal, the fire’s cause remains a mystery—arson was suspected.

Orlean’s account of the arson investigation reads like a whodunit. In her minute-by-minute account of the conflagration, she writes, “The library was spreading fluidly, like spilled ink.” The stacks acted as fireplace flues, while the books provided fuel.” One firefighter later told Orlean, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell.” The main suspect was a young wannabe actor named Harry Peak, who died in 1993. An infuriating yet irresistible personality, Peak had a series of constantly changing alibis.

After interviewing Peak’s family and friends, Orlean concludes that as likable as he seemed to be, he was “mighty close” to being a pathological liar. She notes that he offered each of his changing alibis “with certainty and a full-throated delivery of, ‘This is exactly what I was doing that day.’”

That’s very rare, Orlean explains. “A lot of people have an alibi for a crime. It’s rare to have seven.”

She spent four and a half years researching, interviewing and writing. “I made a decision that I wanted to spend time in every department. Every piece of the library, from the people in the basement cataloging all the way up through all of the subject departments. That took a good amount of time, as well as just going [to the library] a lot to get a feel for the place.”

Orlean’s far-reaching research even involved starting her own little inferno so she could see firsthand what Peak might have experienced if he had indeed started the fire. Appropriately enough, she decided to burn a paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s classic book-burning novel, Fahrenheit 451. She chose a windless day in her backyard, finding the task “incredibly hard,” because she has “come to believe that books have souls.”

She was amazed to discover that books catch fire “like little bombs.” She adds, “It just seemed like [the book] grabbed the flames and went boom. I remember asking my husband, ‘Did that just happen?’ I kept thinking, ‘Wow, that was just crazy that went so fast.’ There was nothing left.”

With crackling, page-turning prose, Orlean manages to seamlessly weave the story of the library’s devastating fire and the aftermath with a bird’s eye look at both the mechanics of LA’s immense city library and its unexpectedly riveting history. Just like the library itself, Orlean’s book is filled to the brim with a wide array of fascinating details and behind-the-scenes personalities and anecdotes. For book lovers, it’s a veritable treasure trove.

Orlean mentions that librarianship has become more popular. “It really does combine a sense of social contribution with a generation of young people who’ve grown up with information technology. I think there’s a fascination with curating and accessing information, and then you combine that with doing something that feels like it has a social value.”

Might her latest book inspire readers to join the profession?

“If that were to happen, I would feel that I had done something amazing.”

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Noah Fecks.

Monica L. Smith is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA. Her fascinating new book, Cities, looks at the 6,000-year-old phenomenon of urbanism. She draws on her fieldwork at archaeological sites worldwide as well as on scholarship and contemporary observation to produce a thought-provoking look at cities. Naturally, we had some questions.

You say that this book was a lot of fun for you to write. What are the top two or three things that made it so much fun?
First of all, writing the book was a chance to relive many exciting moments that I’ve experienced at the ancient (and modern) cities I have known and loved. And it was possible to go from one to the other in my mind and on the page in ways that wove together a story about continuities and similarities. Secondly, as an archaeologist I’m accustomed to solving puzzles in which there are a lot of missing pieces. Through a comparative approach, even if a piece is missing in any particular ancient city—some cities have historical documents but others don’t, and some cities have been thoroughly excavated while others have not—we can put together an urban picture by creatively examining the parts that are preserved. And searching for images was enjoyable, too, because I found some amazing things in my research like Juan de Solórzano Pereira’s drawing from 1653, in which he fancifully placed eyes on the city walls—300 years before the invention of CCTVs!

You write that your favorite place in Rome is not among the usual tourist sites but instead an ancient trash dump. Where’s the fun in that?
Archaeologists aren’t driven just by the romance of ruins but by the sheer thrill of putting together a story of the past through the bits and pieces that we find. The trash dump of Monte Testaccio is at first glance nothing particularly special, but then you look closely at the hill and realize that the whole thing is made up of potsherds. Just think of all of the wine and olive oil that was shipped and spilled there! There must have been lively chitchat 2,000 years ago about whether Falernian or Sardinian or Cilician wine was best (just like the conversations that you have in your local Trader Joe’s about the relative merits of vintages from France, Italy and Argentina). Another fun aspect is that Monte Testaccio is much less crowded than the usual tourist sites, where it’s sometimes hard to contemplate the past because there are so many people trying to get the perfect angle on a selfie.

You are a professor in UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Yet in this book you more or less sing the praises of consumption and ancient takeout food. Aren’t consumption and sustainability at odds?
That’s a great question, and one that I’ve also been thinking about. As ecologically minded global citizens, our approach to consumption might be all wrong if we try to stop consumption rather than figuring out why we want to consume in the first place. For the past million years, our species has been focused on getting more stuff, which is not an impulse that we are going to be able to stop or turn around very easily. Having “stuff” is a marker of what it means to be human. (Even Marie Kondo isn’t trying to get us to give up all of our stuff but to focus on things that are meaningful and joyous!) As for takeout food, it’s probably more sustainable in terms of food waste than preparing meals at home. Just imagine that you want a kale salad for dinner: If you buy a whole head of kale and a jar of garlic dressing, much of it will go bad in between tonight and your next kale craving. But if a restaurant buys that head of kale, then it will be used up by a whole variety of consumers and thus not go to waste. And takeout food has a certain kind of social justice encoded in it, because of the jobs that enable a vast diversity of people to make a living.

You note that most ancient cities were not built in “paradisiacal locales.” In a nutshell, why do cities seem to prosper in challenging environments?
Most cities are really great for something (like being a trade port or a ski capital or a manufacturing place), but few cities are all-purpose, and some of them are downright illogical in their placement—like New Orleans because of floods or Tokyo because of earthquakes or ancient Rome because of malaria that was at the time endemic to the swampy lowlands of the Tiber. Yet their residents are happy to overlook a city’s deficiencies because other characteristics make it worthwhile to dig out from disaster, over and over again. And once you get a population in a densely occupied area like a city, there are opportunities for new kinds of jobs that keep people there. Richard E. Ocejo (Masters of Craft, Princeton 2018) has recently written about cities in the U.S. that were once manufacturing hubs but have evolved into centers for the knowledge economy (information management, finance and technology). Even though there are “growing pains” such as gentrification associated with those transformations, the cities themselves don’t lose populations and just keep right on going.

You write of humans as migratory beings and of the vibrancy of cities being in part due to their mixture of people and cultures. In what way, if at all, does that shape your opinion of our contemporary debates on refugees and “illegal” immigrants?
Cities are intricately bound up in national discussions of migration and ethnicity around the world. We know that when immigrants can choose their destinations, they tend to head toward cities to maximize their employment and continuing-education opportunities. (Remember that immigrants include professionals as well as manual laborers.) In the U.S., programs of refugee resettlement target cities as places that are already diverse. So we shouldn’t be surprised that cities are front and center for discussions about all types of migration.

At one point, you write that we need an archaeology of the disenfranchised. What would that look like and mean?
Most archaeologists have focused on elite residences, tombs and temples, which makes it appear as though ancient societies were somehow richer or more prosperous than ours. Low-income people and slum dwellers are part and parcel of every urban center in the modern world, and increasing amounts of archaeological research show that they were omnipresent in ancient societies as well. We can study these low-income populations by digging in areas on the “backsides” of fancy houses to find servant quarters and makeshift housing, and by looking at the health and well-being of the whole population as archaeologists in Rome and Mesopotamia have started to do. That research can make us a little uncomfortable with our assumptions about ancient behavior, because mortality profiles and habitual violence as revealed by skeletal evidence show that urban life has always come with haves and have-nots. If we want to combat that trend in our own cities, we have to recognize that we need to work harder on equalizing urban opportunities instead of assuming that everyone will do well on their own.

Most of your current fieldwork is in India. What are you discovering?
Along with my Indian colleague Rabindra Kumar Mohanty and our many faculty collaborators and students, we have been digging at both a large urban center and smaller village sites in eastern India. The village sites are particularly interesting to study because they are quite modest: there are very few consumer goods, and the housing was made of perishable materials like bamboo and thatch. Once the city was started, it seems that people—especially young people!—ran away to the “bright lights” of urbanism where they could experience things that seem very mundane to us now but that would have been new and exciting to them: brick and stone buildings, formal marketplaces where they could get ready-made food, new types of construction work on projects like the mighty city wall and the opportunity to spend their earnings on cheap but stylish trinkets like beads and terracotta ornaments.

You cast many of your descriptions of ancient cities and activities within those cities in surprisingly contemporary terms. Why did you decide to write about the long-ago past in this way?
Actually, it’s the data from the past that provide a compelling first-person realization that people in ancient cities had the same experiences and perspectives that we do. When you read in 2,000-year old poetry from India that “bejewelled dames in sky-high mansions live, whose fine clothes wave about their waists,” you can’t help but think about Beverly Hills. When you read a text from ancient Mesopotamia about 350,000 goats and sheep, you can’t help but think about the Chicago Board of Trade. And when you read about Juvenal complaining that he can’t walk in the street without being bumped by some clumsy guy with a barrel, you can’t help but think about the way that you dodge delivery people on the sidewalk whether you’re in Manhattan, Mumbai or Mombasa.

I’m curious about your observation that “the excess of anxiety is not a flaw of urbanism but a design feature.” How is something unpleasant like anxiety helpful to city life?
Most of the anxiety that we face in cities isn’t necessarily debilitating or unpleasant but simply a result of calculating the benefits of the increased choices of food, work and goods that we have in an urban setting compared to rural places. When we have an examination or a job interview or are simply buying a new appliance or trying out something different for lunch, what we are really doing is engaging in a process of risk and reward as we try to have something “better,” even if we are not quite sure how it is going to work out. In cities our choices are amazingly varied, and at every scale: what neighborhood to live in and what school for your kids, but also, “If I buy those cool shoes, will I finally start running again?” And on a serious note, when we do face significant and debilitating anxieties, there are more facilities and experts to treat them in cities than in the countryside. (Many studies have observed that the suicide rate in rural areas is higher than in cities.)

With our largely interconnected planet today, isn’t almost every person a city-dweller, even if they live in the sticks?
Well, there’s still a difference between being affected by cities (which practically everyone in the world is) and actually living in one. One telling example is the way in which tech companies such as Google and Facebook are sticking with the urban form even though they have to pay much higher prices for office space. If they were being logical about costs, they would locate themselves “in the sticks,” as you say. (They are digital corporations after all!) But instead they are going right into the heart of cities because they want to attract the kinds of workers who thrive on the amenities and diversity that only cities can offer.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Cities.

Jazz-Age America promises all the drama you could ever hope for: bootleggers and flappers, parties and criminals and crooked government agents. All this and more come alive in Karen Abbott’s compulsively readable The Ghosts of Eden Park.

For all the surprises packed within its pages, perhaps the greatest is that every single line of dialogue comes directly from a primary source. It’s a true researching feat—and it means we’re extra excited to see Abbott at this year’s Southern Festival of Books. We reached out to her about book-tour traditions and what it’s like to interact with her readers.

What is the mark of a really great book event?
The enthusiasm and the energy of the crowd, lots of sales, people who laugh at my jokes . . . 😉

What have you most enjoyed about interacting with the readership of The Ghosts of Eden Park?
I love hearing people’s personal connections to the history: Someone’s grandfather was a bootlegger; another’s grandmother was a flapper; and numerous others share fascinating tales of far-flung ancestors who operated speakeasies or ran errands for George Remus or sought legal help from Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Those kinds of connections make these long-dead characters come back to life.

When visiting a city for a book event, do you have any rituals, either for yourself or to get to know the city?
I like to find an off-the-beaten-path local bar—something tucked away, with an interesting and possibly wicked history—and enjoy the signature cocktail while I review my notes.

If you could sit in the audience of an event with any author, living or dead, who would you like to see read from and discuss their book?
Tough one! Male author: Edgar Allan Poe, talking about The Fall of the House of Usher and The Philosophy of Composition. Female author: Patricia Highsmith on This Sweet Sickness, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley or any of her choosing.

What have you learned about your book through your interactions with its readers that you didn’t know before it was published?
This book was a bit of a departure for me; I structured it like a true crime thriller and whodunit. Even though The Ghosts of Eden Park is history and the events are google-able, I am pleasantly surprised that people want to approach it as it if were fiction. They want to be surprised by the twists and turns and to guess who murders whom.

Were there any elements of your research into The Ghosts of Eden Park that didn’t make it into the book?
I could have written an entire chapter on ways ordinary citizens smuggled alcohol or subverted Prohibition laws. There was a “book” titled The Four Swallows that disguised a flask; flip the top and you’d find four vials to be filled with the whiskey of your choice. There were “cow shoes” that didn’t hold liquor but were invaluable for bootleggers who made moonshine in meadows or forests. The wooden heels were carved to resemble animal hooves, and they literally covered the bootleggers’ tracks when being pursued on foot by Prohibition agents. And one more: a female Prohibition named Daisy Simpson, aka “Lady Hooch Hunter,” who deserves a book of her own.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Ghosts of Eden Park.

Author photo by Gilbert King