But - and here’s both the mystery and the charm of Susan Orlean - it has made for a lovely book.
Really, no one should search this material for a movie. Afterward, the most compelling related dramas were the various efforts to dry the books. To which I now say: If you think “The Orchid Thief” was challenging to adapt, take a crack at “The Library Book.” The most cinematic thing that’s ever occurred inside the Los Angeles Central Library appears to be this one fire, and even the fire wasn’t all that cinematic, as fires go. She’s done this sort of thing before - most famously with “The Orchid Thief.” Spike Jonze seized upon that one to make a movie (“Adaptation”), which was primarily a satire aimed at Hollywood but also a decent argument that there was no way to turn a Susan Orlean book into a movie unless you tossed the book out and replaced it with a more conventionally thrilling story. And yet now Susan Orlean - who, back in 1986, like most of the rest of the world, had failed to notice that there had even been a fire inside the Los Angeles Central Library - has written an entire book about it. Maybe more to the point, nothing in the subsequent 32 years has occurred to heighten the natural interest of the subject. It was just one of the many senseless, regrettable things that happened, was briefly noted and then more or less forgotten. But even after arson was suspected, and a suspect identified, the fire never laid any claim to the public’s imagination.
The New York Times didn’t bother to mention it until the day after it had been extinguished, and only then as an aside, on Page A14. The fire didn’t attract much attention at the time - maybe in part because that same week a nuclear reactor melted down in Chernobyl and sent the stock market crashing. Nobody died, though 50 firefighters were injured and more than a million books were damaged. On April 29, 1986, the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles caught fire and burned.
THE LIBRARY BOOK By Susan Orlean Illustrated.
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