photo by: Corey Hendrickson

Susan Orlean is the author of various magazine articles and several books, including "The Library Book" and "The Orchid Thief," which is the subject of the movie "Adaptation." Her latest book, "On Animals," comes out Oct. 12. The Lawrence Public Library will host a discussion on Sunday, Oct. 3, between Orlean and LPL Director Brad Allen about libraries and Orlean’s experience researching “The Library Book.”

When the man giving Susan Orlean a tour of the Los Angeles Public Library pulled a book from the shelf, inhaled deeply from its pages and told her that you could still smell the smoke in some of them, she asked uncertainly if it was from previously allowing people to smoke in the building.

Orlean had not heard of the fire that took place there in 1986 — the most catastrophic library fire in U.S. history — burning through hundreds of thousands of books and forcing the library to close for seven years. She’d been living in New York in 1986, and news of the fire had been overshadowed by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Her tour of the library, approximately 25 years after the fire, would eventually lead her to write a book on the subject.

Orlean, a journalist and New York Times bestselling author, had recently moved to Los Angeles, and she toured the central library after first visiting a branch of it with her son — which reawakened fond memories of the regular trips she and her mother had taken to the library near her childhood home in Ohio. Before the tour, she thought that she was done writing books, preferring smaller writing projects. But that changed when she learned about the colossal fire that burned 400,000 books and damaged many more — and the enigmatic young man who was suspected of arson but never charged.

The result was “The Library Book,” which follows Orlean’s research about the carousel of characters who ran and contributed to the library over its history; the destructive fire and its aftermath; and the mystery of whether Harry Peak, an aspiring actor trying to make his way in Los Angeles, may have been responsible for the fire. Underpinning the tale is Orlean’s own appreciation for books and libraries, and the evolving question of what libraries represent for the communities they serve.

Orlean is the author of various magazine articles and several books, including “The Orchid Thief,” which is the subject of the movie “Adaptation.” Her latest book, “On Animals,” comes out Oct. 12. And on Sunday, the Lawrence Public Library will host a discussion featuring Orlean and the library’s director, Brad Allen, who was formerly a children’s librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. They’ll be talking about libraries and Orlean’s experience researching “The Library Book.”

In advance of her visit, Orlean spoke to the Journal-World about the book and the role she thinks libraries serve today.

Journal-World: You write toward the beginning of the book that before learning about the fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, you had decided you were done with writing books. What particularly intrigued you about the fire or otherwise motivated you to write “The Library Book”?

Susan Orlean: I hadn’t decided that I didn’t want to write anymore, but I definitely thought I’m just going to write for magazines; I can’t bear the idea of going down the rabbit hole for years and years on a project. When I heard this story about the fire, it interested me immediately. I just thought, “Wow, this is a great story.” I knew instantly that it had to be a book; it couldn’t be a magazine piece because of the complexity of the story. And in its own way, it spoke to the whole appeal of writing books, which is their permanence and their significance to us. Obviously, if you care about reading, you read in all sorts of ways, and as we were just saying, you read the newspaper, you read magazines, but books have a very special place in human history; they have a permanence that is really meaningful. And so the irony of hearing about this terrible fire and thinking, “Oh my god, books were being damaged and books are so meaningful,” I think made me realize that there was a good reason to dive back into that kind of project.

JW: I was really struck by part of the book that went through some of the historical instances of book burning. What did researching and writing the book impress upon you about the function or role of books and what it means when they are burned?

SO: That was one of the most interesting parts of the research for me, because I think we all sort of know in the back of our mind that there have been book burnings throughout history. But certainly I had never imagined that it was as widespread and as common as it has been in the history of mankind. The thing that struck me the most is that it seems to be sort of a signature move of a repressive regime, and an effort to dominate a society. In a weird way it kind of reminds us of how powerful books are, that a strongman dictator taking over a country feels threatened by the books that are there — because books have history, they tell the truth, they contain the identity of a culture. And so there is just this impulse that if you want to take over a nation or people, the first thing you have to do is burn their libraries.

And sometimes I think it’s done because it’s so unnerving. People react really strongly to the idea of books being burned. I don’t have specific, detailed data on this, but I don’t think there is a culture on Earth that doesn’t react really powerfully to the idea of books being burned. It’s something that people feel very strongly about, and more than they do (for) just about any other object. There’s a way that we just feel that books are human, and they’re special in some way that goes beyond the paper and ink and glue. There is something that we feel about books that transcends the reality of the book. And there is something that feels very human about them, so burning them feels like a real act of aggression.

JW: The reawakening of your interest in libraries seemed to begin when you began taking your son to the library, and the image of the library checkout card in the back of the book includes the names of your mother, you and your son. What do the changes that we’ve seen in the function of libraries over the recent generations say to you about the nature of libraries?

SO: I think libraries always were community hubs. They begin in many cases as the one place you could read a newspaper or a magazine, so people would gather there to read and in early days a lot of times they would play cards and hang out. So some of what we’re seeing with libraries evolving into these community centers, it’s certainly new, but it’s not unheard of. It’s not something that’s a new aspect of libraries that has no precedent. Public libraries have always been more than just repositories of books.

They’ve always had a more public function. In the current iteration they have really embraced that, because some aspects of book borrowing can now be done remotely. You can borrow an e-book from the library, so you never have to physically go to the library, but libraries are very much physical places. They’ve refashioned themselves to take advantage of that, because, oddly, when you think about it, there really aren’t that many public places. And there certainly aren’t that many where it would be perfectly reasonable to go in the morning and stay all day and do your work.

JW: It’s been a few years since you published this book. If you were to write an epilogue today, what would you want to add, either on libraries or your feelings about who was responsible for the fire?

SO: Oh, that’s a good question. My feeling about who is responsible remains (unsettled). I’ve gotten lots of prank calls and emails from people saying, “I know who did it.” Of course I hoped that there would be one that seemed credible, because what would be more amazing than to be able to say, “Guess what? Now I finally have the answer to the mystery.” But they were all kooks who were full of loony theories about what had happened. So I haven’t advanced that in any way — which you know, who knows, maybe at some point someone will shake loose, but so far that hasn’t happened.

I think we’ve seen something really interesting about what’s gone on over these last two years with libraries being closed and then scrambling to do what they could do remotely. And we’re all really lucky that this happened at a point where you could do certain things from afar. Most libraries opened to curbside delivery and they did whatever they could to adapt and accommodate the circumstances of the moment. And it would have been an interesting postscript — obviously not one that anyone would have wished for. It removed the thing that we were so used to, which is that you can go to the library, and yet libraries scrambled to do whatever they could to fill in. And some of that is just that the people who work in libraries do it because they really love it, and they really take it seriously as a social mission.

Orlean will speak at 7 p.m. at Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St. Proof of vaccination is required to attend, and masks will also be required throughout. Doors will open at 6 p.m., and seating will be limited to the first 300 people who attend. The Raven Book Store will have copies of her work for sale, and a signing will follow her talk. The talk will also be streamed, and attendees may register for the virtual component of the event on the library’s website, lplks.org.