The world outside of California hardly noticed the blaze destroying Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. Although it was the worst library fire in American history, it was largely ignored for it coincided with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Library fires, often started deliberately, are not rare events in the USA and elsewhere. There have been many such fires throughout history. Caesar set alight the library at Alexandria. The Nazis were infamous book burners. Often what is gone is irreplaceable. Manuscripts and early editions vanish, taking part of human memory and identity with them. Something more than paper burns. Something of life itself is lost.

There are also heroic tales of rescue. Susan Orlean in The Library Book, recounts the fire in a Russian library in 1988 when a crowd of onlookers defied the police, firefighters and bulldozers by rescuing as many books as possible, taking them home and drying them out. Most of the books, some dating back centuries, were saved.

Susan Orlean, who lives some of the time in California, was so intrigued by the Los Angeles fire that she came to know the library well. She talked with librarians, and with those investigating the fire. Her account, is a detailed examination of the events surrounding the fire. It is also a history of the library in question. The thread running through the text is a series of thoughts on the nature and purpose of libraries. Her lightness of touch, her command of language, and her narrative skill [she writes for the New Yorker] make a compelling read out of the seemingly mundane.

Before the fire the author had considered libraries to be somewhat dull and institutional places. Her preference was for bookshops. One can see why. When a book is owned it is a part of your life, sitting at home waiting for you. A borrowed item has to be returned. It lives elsewhere. Libraries arouse ambivalent feelings. All those resources are inviting, but their monumental storehouses can be so forbidding. The raging fire exposed the vulnerability of the library. The burning, whether the result of arson or not, was a terrible violation, a wound in the heart of the city.

About one thing Susan Orlean is clear. She is certain that books are central to civilisation. Why should she not affirm that books are the genetic code of culture? Even as electronic media pervade all aspects of life, it is the printed book that holds its place because print is surely the senior medium. It denotes permanence and continuity as well as the limitless possibilities for garnering culture. No-one has read every book there is.

The surprise is that even in our busy lives we are able to read so much. When we are reading time actually seems to expand, enabling us to read against the clock. A library becomes not a building with confining walls but an infinite space. We lose ourselves there when we find ourselves absorbed in some unexpected reading.

Libraries, however, are not only about the lending of books. Enquiry desks are in constant demand for all manner of questions. Libraries house reading groups, children’s activities, theatre groups, literacy classes and other ancillary activities to stimulate the habits of a higher cultural life. Tellingly, library use among young people [in the USA at least] is actually growing. There is so much electronic media cannot do and cannot give. Literate culture is not dying.

I bristle at the phrase ‘library writing’ which one of our respected novelists has used to dismiss well-crafted storytelling. It is, as Gertrude Stein told the young Hemingway, the foundation of all fiction. There is an age-old need for unadorned stories. It is a tribute to the 320,000 libraries in the world that there is somewhere to go to nourish our senses of enquiry and imagination.

Library users are able to use their library as a personal experience or as a social space or indeed as both.  Reading groups encourage a sharing of personal responses. As Susan Orlean observes, the deadly silence of libraries is a myth, but a relative quietude enables a discovery of deeper understanding away from the cacophonies of street, workplace and family.

A library is the hub of a community, which is why neighbourhood branches are so vital. They are the place to go for information, social exchange and cultural nourishment. A public library gives access to all, including the least fortunate. They are free to use. A public library is democracy at work in daily life.

That does not diminish the need for bookshops. They act as a complement to libraries. A bookshop is a commercial enterprise, but one carrying a powerful sense of public service. People work there for low salaries because they love books. Bookshops encourage personal ownership not just of an actual book but also of the culture of reading. You buy a book as a share in a civilised enterprise.

Bookshops are also social spaces with events, including readings where readers can meet authors. Bookshops often have cafes now, inviting the public into an amiable frame of mind. Many have large children’s sections. Early encouragement can create a lifelong attachment. Yet I wonder if it is not also a reflection of the habit of reading falling away in later life?

It is heartening to learn that independent bookshops in Britain are growing. It can feel often that the formulaic high street chain has devoured bookselling like everything else. The independent bookshop has a personality reflecting its owner’s and loyal customers’ tastes. It may be small and hidden away in cheaper premises. You discover these places by chance, and in them you make unexpected discoveries. It happens in many places the world over. Tellingly, there is a bookshop in Avignon called Le Memoire du Monde (the World’s Memory). I know no better title.

For Jorge Carrion ‘every bookshop is a condensed version of the world.’ Bookshops is the simple title of Carrion’s interesting and well-researched survey.  A bookshop in this view is both a physical presence and an idea in the mind. Bookshops, even if independent of and distant from one another, link in an informal network. There is a fellowship of readers who may never meet yet who share a common identity. Every bookshop has an atmosphere created by both bookseller and reader. The great bookshops of the world contain the spectral memory of the writers who went there. The ghosts of the great are almost visible. You may be lucky to see a living author actually there, browsing.

These things, we may feel, are also true of libraries, although there are evident differences between libraries and bookshops in practical terms. There is also a difference in purpose and meaning. Carrion puts it like this: ‘Culture cannot exist without memory, but needs forgetfulness too. While the library insists on remembering everything the bookshop selects, discards, adapts to the present thanks to a necessary forgetfulness.’ To put it another way, libraries can seem functional and institutional whereas a good bookshop is a more casual and quirky place, a little dusty and rather untidy, like life. That is why the library and the bookshop complement each other, and why we require them equally.

– Geoffrey Heptonstall