When Susan Orlean’s new book arrives next week at my branch library, it will be assigned the Dewey decimal number 027.4794, which puts it in class 000, the designation for Computer Science, Information & General Works. More specifically it will be shelved in the General Libraries section of the Library & Information Sciences subclass. I know you may not care about something so esoteric as the Dewey decimal system—but then you haven’t read Orlean’s book.

The Library Book, released this week by Simon & Schuster, will be slipped by a conscientious librarian between James Weigland’s Part of our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (027.473), a densely-printed tome that looks like something published by Oxford UP (because it was), and James Conaway’s America’s Library: The Story of The Library of Congress 1800–2000 (027.573), a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book that is probably for sale in said congressional library’s gift shop. It’s fitting shelf-space for a writer like Orlean, whose work so deftly bridges the engaging and the erudite.

The Library Book is ostensibly about the devastating 1986 Los Angeles’s Central Library fire, a disaster few of us remember since it was overshadowed by headlines of the Chernobyl disaster. When you’re worried about a radioactive cloud enveloping the planet, it’s hard to muster much concern about lost books, but Orlean leads us back to give this unsung tragedy its due. The fire destroyed hundreds of thousands of books (including, the author points out, Fahrenheit 451), consumed irreplaceable public art, and left a major urban center debating what libraries are and what they should be.

As she did in The Orchid Thief, Orlean exploits her subject to offer vistas of worlds we never guessed we’d care about. Her book is about a particular event in a particular building at a particular hour, but along the way she takes us on side tours of sexism in library science, the history and purpose of book burning, new trends in fire investigation, and how NASA helped figure out a way to suck 250,000 pounds of water from sodden paper. We shake hands with people we’re fascinated to meet—from televangelists to obsessive hoarders, from a map-shrewd savant to a fire investigator serving time for arson-related murder. We even spend a shift at the reference desk’s phone bank:

Patron call. Wanted to know how to say “The necktie is in the bathtub” in Swedish. He was writing a script.

Patron called to ask whether it is necessary to rise if National Anthem is played on radio or television.

Patron inquiring whether Perry Mason’s secretary Della Street is named after a street, and/or whether there is a real street named Della Street.

Patron asked for help writing inscription for father’s tombstone.

Far from being just repositories for old-timey things—reference books, paper maps, movies on DVD, avid readers—Orlean shows us that libraries have become the front lines of our most pressing concerns, like immigration and education, art and opportunity. They provide expensive scores to cash-strapped orchestras. They are where cities interact most intimately with the homeless. They help us write our screenplays and lay our parents to rest. They are vital and inventive. They are anything but archaic.

But, yes, there are the books, and some of us still love them. As Orlean writes:

You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.

Thank God for Susan Orlean’s crazy courage and this precious, foolish, brave book she’s given us.

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