The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Author:Susan Orlean
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

14.

Wasa-Wasa: A Tale of Trails and Treasure in the Far North (1951)

By Macfie, Harry

971.05 M144

Map Librarianship: An Introduction (1987)

By Larsgaard, Mary Lynette

025.176 L334

Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding (2014)

Series: Treatments That Work

By Tolin, David F.

616.8522 T649

Genealogy, and Enjoying It (1982)

By Coleman, Ruby Roberts

929.01 C692-1

History is on the lowest floor of the library and occupies the largest space of any department, stretching from the bottom of the escalator across the width of the building’s new wing. Glen Creason, one of the department’s senior librarians, entered library school in 1979 on a whim, thinking it would be a good place to meet attractive women. That year, the head of the RAND Corporation announced that libraries would soon be obsolete. Creason is now the longest-tenured librarian at Central Library. He has a scramble of blondish-white hair with unruly bangs, a scrubby beard, and a body like an exclamation point. He likes pretending to be stern and cynical, perhaps to hide the fact that he is a softie and deeply sentimental. He has waxed nostalgic about such things as the days when the library had a switchboard, operated by an elegant lady named Pearl; when material was moved from department to department via pneumatic tubes; the days when one addressed librarians as “Mrs.” or “Miss” or, on that rare occasion, “Mr.”; the days when a librarian named Tom Owens walked five miles to and from work every day; when Creason would have lunch with a clerk named Ted Itagaki, who “could swallow an entire hamburger in three bites.” He has waxed less nostalgic about the days after the fire, when he was overcome by despair. That was when he was working in the library’s temporary location on Spring Street and hypodermic needles would fall off the shelves as he was putting books away. Over the years, he has become a sort of library himself: He is the repository of endless stories about the library’s most interesting patrons. One that he described to me, for instance, was a former math teacher from Wisconsin who had a nervous breakdown and ended up in Los Angeles; he spent almost every day in the History Department, reading or cutting his hair over the wastebasket, and sometimes making announcements to the librarians like “I walked from Racine to Sheboygan in the dead of winter. Froze my penis and my nipples,” before returning to his hair cutting or his books. Or the octogenarian twins—Creason and his colleagues referred to them as Heckle and Jeckle—who came to the library daily, spending their time reading Herodotus and Thucydides and telling Creason the very same joke every day for seven years. Or the patron who claimed he was the sultan of Brunei (he wasn’t) and insisted that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage at the exact minute when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Over the months I spent with him, Creason told me stories about Rubber Man and Antler Man and Stopwatch Man and Stampy and General Hershey Bar

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