The books that survived the fire were in piles where they’d fallen or jammed with their sticky backs together on the shelves. Olivia Primanis, the book conservator, told Wyman Jones that they had to move quickly and freeze the books because mold spores begin to bloom within forty-eight hours after being activated by water. If the books got moldy, they would be unsalvageable. That meant the staff would have to pack, move, and store seven hundred thousand damaged books somewhere cold before mold erupted.
By evening, news of the fire had spread around the city. Hundreds of volunteers came down to the library to help without even knowing what they could offer. There were only a handful of hard hats available and no boxes for the books and no place to store them. Wet books couldn’t simply be put in a warehouse, either, because of the danger of mold. Some years earlier, the Bonaventure Hotel, near the library, had offered space in their restaurant freezer if a rare book got wet and needed to be frozen until a conservator could tend to it. However, the Bonaventure’s freezer couldn’t hold seven hundred thousand soggy books. Los Angeles has a multimillion-dollar fish-processing industry and one of the largest produce depots in the country, so there were huge freezers in town. Someone suggested contacting a few of those fish and produce companies. Though their freezers were full, the companies agreed to clear some space for the books.
The volunteers were sent home with instructions to come back at dawn. Radio and television stations put out a call for more volunteers to come to the library the next day. The Junior League contacted its members and urged them to help out, warning, “This is an enormous and dirty job [that is] moderately to somewhat physical, so please dress accordingly.” IBM gave its employees time off to volunteer. The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library. Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer and former popcorn distributor who had reinvented himself as an expert in drying out wet things. The notion of putting the books in with groceries didn’t faze Lundquist, since he’d freeze-dried his first salvaged books alongside a summer’s worth of peas and carrots from his garden.
It was a huge job. The wet, smoky books needed to be removed, along with every other book in the library; the building had to be emptied so it could eventually be repaired. Wyman Jones decided not to publicly disclose where the books were being stored, in case the fire had been intentional and the arsonist was looking for them.
With Lundquist directing, the volunteers worked for the next three days around the clock. Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, diligently and peacefully. They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.
The volunteers packed more than fifty thousand boxes, each of which held fifteen tightly packed books. Once the boxes were full, they were stacked on pallets—eventually, they filled more than eighteen hundred—and then loaded onto trucks. The dry, undamaged books were taken to a city depository. The wet and smoke-damaged books were taken in refrigerated trucks to the food warehouses, where they were stored on racks between frozen shrimp and broccoli florets at an average temperature of 70 below 0. No one really knew when the wrecked books would be thawed out or how many of them could be saved. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.
As the books were carted away, investigators combed through the building, taking note of the pattern of burn marks on the floor and the path of the flames. In spite of the fire code violations and the fact that a building full of books and bad wiring could have gone up in flames almost spontaneously, investigators believed almost from the beginning that the fire was intentional. This was a conservative assumption, because library fires in the United States are almost always what are known in fire terminology as “incendiary”—namely, a fire caused by human intervention. Most are the result of casual vandalism that gets out of hand.
Los Angeles employed nineteen arson investigators. Twenty agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms joined them on the case. The team’s first concern was to find a clue to how the fire started—maybe a frayed wire that sparked, or a telltale spot of lighter fluid, or a match carelessly tossed near a magazine. The city posted a $20,000 reward for information about the fire’s origin. The ATF added $5,000, and an anonymous donor put up $5,000 more.
After two days of studying the building, investigators weren’t close to any conclusions, but the word “arson” began slipping into stories about the fire. The Los Angeles Daily News ran a story with the headline ARSON STRONGLY SUSPECTED IN FIRE AT CENTRAL LIBRARY. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that library employees were being shown a composite drawing of a “stranger.” On May 6, only a week after the fire, a story in the Los Angeles Times announced LIBRARY FIRE WAS ARSON, BRADLEY AND FIRE CHIEF SAY. Chief Manning was quoted saying, “Without any reservation . . . we can now tell you that it was an arson fire.” According to Manning, they were looking for “a blondish man in his late twenties or thirties who was seen by several employees near the fire’s point of origin . . . six feet tall, 165 pounds, with blue eyes, blond hair, a light mustache, and a rather thin face. He was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a casual shirt.” A composite sketch was released. The man depicted in the sketch had a wide forehead and large eyes, an aquiline nose, the brushy mustache of a cartoon crook, and abundant blond hair that formed a soft corona around his head and winged out in half curls over his ears. You would not swear it was Harry Peak, nor would you swear it wasn’t.
During the week, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl dominated every newspaper around the world except for Pravda, which covered it briefly but managed to find ample room to report on the fire at Central Library. After that first terrifying week of Chernobyl passed, American papers found space to cover the library fire; around the country, there were stories with headlines like BLAZE DESTROYS VALUABLE BOOKS; FLAMES GUT L.A. LIBRARY; A CITY TRAGEDY; FIRE CHARS COLLECTION; UP IN SMOKE. The Boston Globe suggested the events in Chernobyl and in Los Angeles had a “ghostly symmetry” because each raised the primal fear of a fire that was beyond control, along with our dread of menacing and unmanageable power.
Central Library had been a busy place. Each year, more than nine hundred thousand books were loaned; six million reference questions were answered; and seven hundred thousand people passed through the doors. Two days after the fire, it was empty except for the powdery black remains of four hundred thousand destroyed books. The statuary was draped in white plastic tarps. The walls and ceilings were tarred and grimy, the reading rooms vacant. All the entrances were locked and beribboned with police tape. A few flattened boxes lay on the sidewalks on Fifth Street, near the entrance to the library, where someone had hung a handwritten sign that said: THANK YOU, L.A.! WE WILL BE BACK BIGGER AND BETTER.
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