![]() ![]() For while the 1986 LA library fire was spectacular for the seven hours it lasted, it was also oddly indeterminate. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. Susan Orlean has a knack for finding compelling stories in unlikely places. If books could bleed, you would have said the scene was carnage. 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. All the staff and visitors got out safely, although the same, of course, could not be said of the books. As the temperature reached 1370C, the metal shelves brightened from grey to white and then subsided in a tangle of cherry red. The fire started somewhere in the fiction stacks, snaked up the staircases and, gathering force, banged into ceilings. ![]() O n 29 April 1986 Los Angeles Central Library went up in flames. ![]()
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