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101 " the board believed it would be in everyone’s best interest to have a man run the library. "
― Susan Orlean , The Library Book
102 " the cubicles of sin "
103 " Mary Foy was only eighteen years old when she was hired to replace Connolly. While it is surprising that such a young person would have been considered for the position, the bigger surprise was that this young person was a woman, since in 1880 the library was still an organization run by, and catering to, men. Women were not yet allowed to have their own library cards and were permitted only in the Ladies’ Room. No library in the country had a female head librarian, and only a quarter of all American library employees were women. The feminization of librarianship was still a decade away. "
104 " On April 29, 1986, the day the library burned, "
105 " the kind of person who liked to have two cigarettes going at the same time. "
106 " The ban against tall buildings was finally lifted in 1957. Nothing much happened at first; downtown remained stunted compared to most other cities of its size. As developer Robert Maguire put it, Los Angeles seemed destined to be a city “just ten stories high, all over hell and gone. "
107 " The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. "
108 " In 1889, a newspaper reporter from Ohio named Tessa Kelso was appointed to the job. "
109 " Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets—“Althea’s Ways to Achieve Reading”—to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity to read. "
110 " An arson investigator I met described Peak entering a courtroom “with all that hair,” as if his hair existed independently. "
111 " Kelso left Le Cadet on the shelf and then took what the Los Angeles Times called “a sensational and decidedly novel action”—namely, she sued Reverend Campbell for slander "
112 " Kelso maintained that the acquisition of the book was an expression of her free speech. Reverend Campbell argued that his right to pray for someone’s soul was an expression of his free speech. As the lawsuit advanced, Reverend Campbell’s right to free speech seemed to gain the moral upper hand, "
113 " The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace. The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited. "
114 " library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. 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. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. "
115 " One of Manning’s deputies pulled Elizabeth Teoman aside and told her he didn’t know if they could do anything more because the fire was so intense and the building was so hospitable to it, with the stacks acting as fireplace flues and the books providing so much fuel. He asked her to give him a list of the irreplaceable items in the building, in case that was all they could save. "
116 " they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn’t read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs. "
117 " At last count, in 2017, there were almost sixty thousand homeless people in Los Angeles. "
118 " we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. "
119 " The slavery was permitted under an 1850 California law that allowed white people to buy Native American children as “apprentices,” and to “bid” on Native Americans who were declared “vagrant,” and oblige them to work off the cost of the bid. "
120 " A Nigerian librarian told me that her library offers art and entrepreneurship training classes, "