Interesting facts leap out from virtually every page we discover, for instance, that the greatest threat of theft did not come from the poor or disaffected, but from nascent Hollywood studios, which, careful with their finances, would send factotums to steal books needed for movie research.
Orlean moves smoothly between dealing with the fire and its aftermath, the life of the resurrected library today, and its foundation and subsequent history. This is not a book about an unsolved crime. Orlean sensibly leaves it to the reader to decide whether Peak could have been the culprit, or if he was simply an attention-seeker. What caused the fire? At the time, suspicion fell on would-be actor Harry Peak, a fantasist who claimed and then denied responsibility, though he was never charged, nor was anyone else. The flames themselves were “extraordinary and unforgettable” – a colourless, all-consuming force that could be stared through like a pane of glass, even as it destroyed everything in its path. As “the cookbooks roasted”, she conveys the full horror of the fire, how it “glowered angrily, feeding itself book after book, a monster snacking on crisps”.
Orlean describes the conflagration itself with a novelistic relish.
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