Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading with the fascinating history of libraries and the sometimes eccentric characters who run them, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Susan Orlean presents a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling story as only she can. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than 30 years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library - and if so, who? By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more. As one fireman recounted later, “Once that first stack got going, it was good-bye, Charlie.” The fire was disastrous: It reached 2,000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm.
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. Susan Orlean, hailed as a “national treasure” by The Washington Post and the acclaimed best-selling author of Rin Tin Tin and The Orchid Thief, reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history and delivers a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution - our libraries.
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