On 29 April 1986 Los Angeles Central Library went up in flames. The fire started somewhere in the fiction stacks, snaked up the staircases and, gathering force, banged into ceilings. As the temperature reached 1370C, the metal shelves brightened from grey to white and then subsided in a tangle of cherry red. All the staff and visitors got out safely, although the same, of course, could not be said of the books. By the time the fire, and then the high-pressure hoses, had done their worst, half a million volumes were pronounced dead, with the same number again on the critical list. If books could bleed, you would have said the scene was carnage.
Susan Orlean has a knack for finding compelling stories in unlikely places. In 1998 she turned the niche-sounding topic of banditry among the orchid- growing community of Florida into the gripping true crime narrative The Orchid Thief, subsequently filmed by Spike Jonze as the arthouse hit Adaptation. Twenty years on, Orlean again pokes about in an area that most writers would have put in their “interesting but not quite interesting enough” file of possible book ideas. For while the 1986 LA library fire was spectacular for the seven hours it lasted, it was also oddly indeterminate. No one died, the library got back on its feet, the man suspected of arson was never charged, quite possibly because he didn't actually do it.
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