I believe that many readers have seen the Japanese movie "Library War", which is adapted from the science fiction novel of the same name by writer Hiroshi Arikawa. The film tells the story of the 1989 Japanese government, in order to improve the chaotic and degenerate social atmosphere, the government promulgated the Media Improvement Law, set up a special department, and seized and destroyed all books that may affect physical and mental health; at the same time, freedom of expression was also brutally curbed and suppressed. In defense of free thought, the "Library Self-Defense Organization Book Team" came into being, and they took up arms to protect books and gave their lives for it. Around the restraint of discipline and freedom of speech, the Library Self-Defense Force and the media have launched a fierce tug-of-war...
In fact, if there is hostility to books or culture, there are always absurd reasons to find: whether it is to prevent spiritual pollution or to protect the national brain. In 640 AD, the second Caliph in the history of Islam, Omar ibn Khatab, when he led the Muslim army to attack Egypt, in front of the famous Library of Alexandria, he gave the generals such "impeccable": if the books contradict the Qur'an, they should be destroyed; if the books are to confirm the contents of the Qur'an, then they are superfluous, and there is no need for existence...
The list of libraries that have disappeared from the world can be written into a book; war is the biggest killer of libraries. For example, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom War that occurred in late Qing China led to the immeasurable burning and loss of major libraries in Jiangnan. During World War II, more books and libraries were destroyed than at any other time in human history. During the twelve years that the Nazi Party in Germany alone was in power, about 100 million books were destroyed. The German poet Heinrich Heine's warning years ago illustrates this fact: "Someone burns a book here, and finally here he burns a man." ”
The article I push to you today comes from the famous American non-fiction writer Susan Orrin. At one point, she announced that she would close her pen, and because she accidentally learned about the largest library fire in the history of the United States, the Los Angeles Public Library Fire, she regained her memories and feelings about the library, and in one conversation and questioning, an investigation gradually turned into a seven-year library journey, which took seven years to investigate and create "Dear Library". The non-fiction writer, who is admired by He Wei, not only restores the scene on the day of the fire, but also writes about the library war in human history, but also records the American past of a special library; she combines crime, history, biography and immersive journalism, intertwining life memories, detective novels, urban history and meditations on the rise and fall of American public life, and writes this encyclopedic book that leads readers to explore the library, and it is also a love letter to the library, and the dream book of all book lovers.
For Susan Orrin, books are a cultural gene, a code that deciphers our identity as a social collective and what we know. All the miracles and failures, all the winners and all the evils, all the legends, ideas, and the revelations of culture, are all in the book and will remain forever. Destroying these books means that culture itself no longer exists, its history has disappeared, and the continuity it has established in the past and the future has been broken. To strip a book from a culture is to strip away the common memory of that culture. This behavior is like depriving you of the ability to remember dreams.
The following is an excerpt from Susan Orrin's Dear Library, published under the auspices of the New Classic Culture.
Dear Library, by Susan Orrin, translated by Wenzel, New Classic 丨 Wenhui Publishing House, April 2021 edition
The history of human burning libraries is almost as old as the history of building libraries.
As William Blaise wrote in 1880 in the first book in history on the subject of book burning, libraries can easily fall prey to "accidental fires, fanatical arson, burning trials, and even family stoves." The first officially recorded burning of a library in history took place in 213 BC. Qin Shi Huang, the emperor of China at the time, decided to burn any history books that contradicted his version. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.
The libraries that disappeared from the ancient world, the most famous of which is the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Although anecdotal anecdotes about it have long held their place in human history, little is known about it. No one knows what the building really looked like, not even its exact location. Presumably, the library has a million documents and manuscripts and has a hundred resident librarians. The Library of Alexandria was burned several times. The first was in 48 BC when Julius Caesar attacked Alexandria. Caesar did not specifically target the library at the time, but the fire he caused in the harbor spread and eventually engulfed the library. Later, the library was rebuilt and the collection of books was revived, but it was burned down again in two subsequent attacks. Every time it burns, it ushers in a new restoration.
Library of Alexandria
The last burning, which took place in 640 AD, completely erased it from history. At that time, the library was both awe-inspiring and frightening. People believe that libraries are living things: a huge, infinite public brain that occupies all the existing knowledge in the world and has the potential to become the kind of intelligent creatures with independent thinking capabilities that we fear in the age of supercomputers. When Caliph Omar, who led the Muslim invasion of Egypt, came to the library, he told his generals that if the books contained in the library contradicted the Qur'an, they should be destroyed; if they confirmed the contents of the Qur'an, they were superfluous and had no need to exist. In any case, the fate of the library is predestined. It burned down in a day, and the few books that survived were used as fuel to burn bath water in a local bathhouse. The story may or may not be true. Everything about the Library of Alexandria is mysterious. To this day, no one knows if the story about it is true. Even its dramatic fire ending has been questioned: some historians believe the earthquake and budget cuts contributed to its demise. All in all, it was a touchstone in the history of libraries, but its beginnings, developments, and ends remain an unsolved mystery.
In human history, most things have been for money — especially arson — but burning down libraries doesn't make money. Instead, the reason the library burns down is usually because someone thinks it holds some problematic ideas. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the Pope ordered the collection and "cremated" (a carefully chosen term) Jewish books, because he believed that such books were all spreading anti-Catholic ideas. The Spanish Inquisition proposed the concept of a "book burning festival," a community gathering organized around a bonfire fueled by so-called heretical books, including any book written in Hebrew, such as Torah.
Not only at home, but also the Spaniards burned all kinds of books in their hands abroad. In the mid-16th century, Hernán Cortés and his soldiers burned dozens of Aztec manuscripts on the grounds that they involved black magic. After Cortés conquered the Maya, a monk named Diego Delanda was assigned to the Maya to preach Catholicism to them. Fascinated by the Mayan civilization, Delanda recorded in detail the Mayan culture she was exposed to, but nevertheless supervised and executed the torture and torture of dozens of Maya, burning every Mayan manuscript and drawing material she could find. Only a few manuscripts survived the Great Purge of Delanda, and they were sent to Rome for study and decipherment. Today, they are the only surviving documents of the Maya civilization.
Susan Orrin, Honorary Doctor of the University of Michigan, Winner of the Guggenheim Award. He has been writing nonfiction for decades, and has been a full-time writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and has also contributed to vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire and other well-known media, and is one of the most well-known documentary writers in the United States. Representative works include "Orchid Thief" and "Saturday Night", among which "Orchid Thief" was adapted into the film "Adapted Screenplay", which won the Berlin Silver Bear Award. At one point, Orrin announced that she would no longer write books, but when she learned of the Los Angeles Public Library fire incident by chance, she regained her memories and feelings for the library and re-wrote.
The book massacre of the war years: "Some people burn books here, and they burn people here"
The list of libraries that have disappeared from the world is long enough to be written as a book. In fact, there are many books on the subject of the library that no longer exists, including one called The Destruction of Books, written by a library science professor. In the early days of human history, when there were fewer books, high prices for print, and time-consuming production, the disappearance of libraries could mean the end of a civilization. UNESCO published a study on the same subject in 1949 and 1996, listing details of all libraries that have been destroyed throughout the modern history of humanity, as well as the number of books destroyed. According to UNESCO, the number of books destroyed is so large — billions — that I sometimes have a hard time believing that there are books in the world that have survived.
War is the library's biggest killer. Some of these losses were caused by accident. Since libraries are usually located in the heart of cities, libraries are destroyed when cities are attacked. But then again, there are times when libraries are set goals in themselves. More books and libraries were destroyed during World War II than at any other time in human history. During the twelve years that the Nazi Party in Germany alone was in power, about 100 million books were destroyed. As the writer George Orwell put it, book burning was "the most (Nazi) signature action." Nazi Germany's destruction of books began even before the war. As soon as Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he banned all publications that he considered subversive. Books written by Jewish and leftist writers were automatically banned. On May 10, 1933, thousands of banned books were collected in Berlin's Opera Square, an action called "Feuerspruche" in German and "Fire Incantations" in English.
The "Fire Whisperer" was a favorite entertainment item of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who was well aware of how important books were to Jewish culture, theology, and identity. Members of the German Federation of Students carried out the book burning campaign with great enthusiasm. In the opera square, students spontaneously formed a human conveyor belt, handed forbidden books from one hand to the other, and threw them into a whole pile. According to statistics, the number of books in the campfire is between 25,000 and 90,000. When a book is thrown in, a student next to it will announce on the spot that the book was "sentenced to death", just like the scene of a criminal charge. For example, Sigmund Freud's book has been accused of moral corruption and "exaggerating and unhealthily complicating sexual behavior." After reading the reasons for the accusation, the student threw the book into the pile and shouted, "I'm going to burn Sigmund Freud's book!" Other allegations include "Zionist tendencies," "murder of the German language," and "betrayal of the literature of soldiers of World War I." Once the stack of books is finished, it is immediately soaked with gasoline and then set on fire.
The "Fire Whisperer" event has a large gathering atmosphere, with dancing, singing and live music accompaniment. At midnight, Goebbels appeared and delivered a speech known as the "Fire Whispering Speech.". On the same night, Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt and Breslau followed suit. Over the next year, more than thirty similar events took place in university towns across Germany. When the books were burned in Bourne, the local mayor reportedly said seeing the ashes was as if "the souls of the Jews had flown [into the sky]."
Nazi book burning
The destruction of books is particularly painful for the Jews, who have long been known as the "people of books." Judaism considered books sacred, and the most sacred text they handed down, the Torah, was greatly revered: it wore cloth cloaks, decorated with jewelry, and was fitted with silver breastplates and crowns in synagogues. When religious books wear out, they are buried and enjoy formal funeral rites. Jews believed that books were not just printed documents, but also contained humanity and souls. The creators of Jewish writings usually no longer use their original names, but prefer to refer to themselves by the names of their works. The irony of Fire Whisper is that the Nazis took books as seriously as Jews. Because they felt compelled to destroy the book, they recognized the power and value of the book and recognized the Jewish firm belief in the book.
Brutal wars have destroyed and destroyed many libraries in Europe. Some were unlucky enough to get caught up in a series of incendiary bomb explosions and air raids, which meant there were more strategic targets beyond the library. However, the Germans targeted the book as a target for destruction. A task force arson unit known as the "Book Burning Secret Order" was sent to find and burn down the library. This squad is extremely efficient. To list the library's losses in that war— whether accidental or deliberate— were dizzyingly large. There were twenty major libraries in Italy at the time, and two million books were burned. France lost millions of books, including 300,000 in Strasbourg, 42,000 in Beauvais, 23,000 in Chartres, and 110,000 in Doué. The Library of the National Assembly in Paris burned, taking with it countless books on history, art and science. In Metz, officials kept the library's most valuable treasures in a warehouse without any special markings. A German soldier discovered the warehouse and threw an incendiary bomb into it. All books were destroyed, including precious manuscripts from the 11th and 13th centuries. During the Blitz, twenty million books in Britain were burned or damaged by water that extinguished fires. The Central Lending Library of London was completely destroyed (other libraries in the city remained open to the public during the Blitz, maintaining normal working hours and collecting overdue fines as usual).
The Dutch House Library in London, which was destroyed during World War II
After the Munich Conference in 1938, any book published in the Czech language was confiscated, either burned or mashed into pulp. In Vilnius, lithuania, the library of the ghetto was set on fire directly, and a few months later, the inhabitants of the ghetto were transported to concentration camps and poisoned in gas chambers – a fact illustrated by the warning of the German poet Heinrich Heine many years ago: "Some people burn books here, and they end up burning people here." "In Budapest, all the small libraries were destroyed and the large libraries were partially destroyed. The large library of the University of Leuven in Belgium suffered more losses than any other library in Europe. In World War I, the Germans burned it. After the armistice, a consortium of European countries rebuilt it and reopened it to the outside world, with grand celebrations. In 1940, the library was destroyed by German artillery fire, destroying all the books, including paintings created by great masters of the past and nearly a thousand ancient books printed 1,500 years ago. In Poland, eighty percent of the country's books were destroyed. In Kiev, German soldiers paved the way directly with the books in the city library, providing a foothold for their armored vehicles in the mud. The troops then set fire to the library, destroying four million books. On their way through Russia, another ninety-six million books were burned.
The Allied bombing of Japanese and German city centres also inevitably hit the library. Theodore Welch, who studies libraries in Japan, once wrote that when U.S. troops arrived in Japan in 1945, three-quarters of the library's collection had been burned or damaged. The loss of German libraries is also staggering. Most of the collections in the cities of Bremen, Aachen, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, Hanover, Münster and Hamburg were burned. Seven hundred and fifty thousand books were destroyed in Darmstadt, more than a million in Frankfurt and two million in Berlin. By the end of the war, more than a third of Germany's books had disappeared.
The Library Wars After World War II: The Safest Places Have the Deepest Impact
The destruction of libraries and other cultural property during the war prompted Governments around the world to take measures to ensure that this did not happen again. In 1954, the United Nations formulated and adopted the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict in The Hague. At present, one hundred and twenty-seven countries have signed it. However, the protection of cultural property, including ancient books, manuscripts, works of art, monuments and important archaeological sites, is a drop in the bucket. Even, shortly after the formal signing of the treaty, new acts of sabotage took place. The raging flames of the Nazi "Fire Whisper" operation arguably confirmed that book burning was a simple means of viciously suppressing specific groups, and this method was later repeatedly adopted by other authoritarian regimes.
In 1990, following the invasion of Kuwait, Iraqi forces burned down most of the local libraries. Nearly two hundred libraries burned down during the Bosnian War, and ninety percent of the national library in Sarajevo was buried in the fire. The poet Phil Kosino wrote that "the ashes of one and a half million books" blackened the snow that fell on Sarajevo. Under the Taliban, fifteen of the eighteen libraries in Kabul, Afghanistan, were closed, and most of their collections were burned. During the Iraq War, only thirty percent of the books in the Iraqi National Library survived. Some of these books were removed from the building before the war raged in Baghdad: Saddam Hussein, who wanted to expand his private collection, stole a lot of it from the library; some Iraqis who doubted that the library would survive the war also took the books out of their homes. In 2013, when Islamic Jihad retreated from Timbuktu, they destroyed many irreplaceable manuscripts inside the Timbuktu Library, some of which date back to the 13th century.
In 1992, Bosnian musician Vedran Smajlović played cello between the ruins of the National Library
In the United States, there are also a considerable number of book burning incidents, most of which are an angry statement of dissatisfaction with the content of books. In the 1940s, for example, a teacher named Marbel Riddle, with the support of the Catholic Church, began a campaign to collect and burn comic books— she insisted that all comic books had vivid depictions of crime and sex. In her hometown of West Virginia, Marbel used thousands of comics as firewood to light a huge bonfire. The fire received a warm local welcome and soon spread throughout small towns across the country, where many local parishes began to support people burning cartoons. In several places, even the nuns drew the first matches.
Book burning is an extremely inefficient means of warfare because books and libraries have no military value. But this kind of behavior is extremely devastating. The destruction of libraries is an outright act of terrorism. Libraries are widely believed to be the safest and most open places in society. Setting fire here is like announcing to the public that nothing and no place is safe. The most profound impact of book burning is emotional. When libraries burn down, the books inside are sometimes described as "injured" or "dead," just like humans.
Books are a cultural gene, a code that deciphers our identity as a social collective and what we know. All the miracles and failures, all the winners and all the evils, all the legends, ideas, and the revelations of culture, are all in the book and will remain forever. Destroying these books means that culture itself no longer exists, its history has disappeared, and the continuity it has established in the past and the future has been broken. To strip a book from a culture is to strip away the common memory of that culture. This behavior is like depriving you of the ability to remember dreams. The destruction of a culture's books is worse than simply declaring it dead: because to burn books is to erase the traces of the culture's existence.
Cold War-era library wars: Burning books is like a ballet of countless murders
A few months after the end of World War II, some libraries in Europe were still smoking, and a writer named Ray Bradbury began writing a story called The Firefighter, set in a fictional society that banned books altogether. If a family is found hiding a book, firefighters are called in to burn it. Like book-burning squads, firefighters bring flames instead of putting them out. Bradbury began writing Firefighter at the age of thirty. He grew up in Los Angeles and has been writing fantasy and science fiction novels since he was a teenager. As soon as his story is written, it can be quickly sold to people like Imagine! "Amazing Stories", "Super Science Stories" and other science magazines. He graduated from high school in 1938, and Los Angeles was at the heart of the Depression-era economic collapse. His family could not afford to pay for his college.
Fortunately, he had always loved libraries, so as a substitute for college, he spent almost every day of the next thirteen years at the Los Angeles Public Library, reading a variety of materials in various subject areas. He often describes himself as "a librarian educated" and believes he learns more in the library than in college. "I started studying at fourteen and didn't officially graduate until I was twenty-seven," he concluded years later, "when I went through every damn room in the whole building." I read almost a hundred books in each of them... I read all the poetry in the world. All the scripts. All suspenseful murder novels. All essay essays. "At first, the library was a necessity in Bradbury's life, but it soon became his passion for home — especially the Central Library." The library is my nest," he wrote, "the place where I was born, where I grew up." ”
"Book Burning Squad in the Forbidden Book Nation"
Bradbury spent several months on Firefighter, then grew tired and set aside. Four years later, right-wing demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech claiming that the State Department was rife with communist parties and "loyalty risks," sparking unwarranted fears throughout American society. Bradbury had previously described McCarthy as a "very eccentric senator" and therefore fearful. He decided to go ahead and finish Firefighter because the story was surprisingly predictable about the political situation at the time.
Bradbury has four young daughters with his wife. When he tries to create at home, he spends much more time playing with his children than he does writing. He couldn't afford to rent an office, but he knew that there was a room in the basement of the UCLA Powell Library where he could rent a typewriter for twenty cents per hour. It occurred to him that if he were to write a book about burning books in the library, it would be a wonderful resemblance to go there and create them. So, in the typewriter's room at UCLA, Bradbury wrote Firefighter in nine days and expanded it into a small novel. The rent for the typewriter totaled nine dollars and eighty cents.
The story of "The Firefighter" is unforgettable. The protagonist is a young firefighter named Montag who lives with his wife, Mildred. Their lives seem to be orderly, but they are like a pool of stagnant water, limited by all aspects. Mildred lives as if he were sleepwalking, drugged by endless television entertainment and drugs. Montag appears to be a firefighter who obeys his command, but deep inside lies a dangerous secret: he becomes curious about books and begins to hide the books he has been assigned to burn. He had obediently lit thousands of books before that, but as soon as he began to read them, he immediately began to realize what the things he had destroyed meant. "This is the first time," he said to himself, "I realize there's a guy behind every book. One day, Mildred noticed that her husband was reading a book and quickly reported it to the firefighter, his colleague. Colleagues burned down his family's house and books. After the incident, the firefighters also tried to kill him, but Montag managed to escape the city. Finally, he stumbled upon a group of banished people. They were all book lovers, living in the middle of nowhere, trying to preserve literary works by trying to memorize them and constantly memorizing them aloud. They chanted Shakespeare and Proust all day long, and the sound came and went, and the whole camp came alive. As one member of the organization told Montag, they were "homeless on the outside, library on the inside," and they kept books by returning them to their origins: this tradition of returning to oral storytelling made stories live longer than paper and ink.
Surprisingly, in Bradbury's book, the description of the burning book is not terrible; in fact, the description is incredibly beautiful, almost like magic. He described the books being burned as "black butterflies" or burning birds that "have red and yellow feathers flashing on their wings." In the book, the flame is not repulsive; it is seductive—a gorgeous and mysterious force that transforms figurative matter. Fire is "something that humans want to invent but absolutely can't do." These elegant descriptions make the idea of burning books all the more disturbing, like a ballet performance that has been staged in countless murders.
After the book was written, Bradbury tried to come up with a better title than Firefighter. Unable to find a satisfactory one, one day, on impulse, he called the Los Angeles Fire Department Chief and asked what the temperature of the paper was burning. The director's answer became the official title of the book: "Fahrenheit 451." When the Central Library burned down in 1986, all the books in the novel area, from A to L, were buried in the fire, including all of Ray Bradbury's works.
Cover of the 451 Degrees Fahrenheit commemorative edition
Library wars in peacetime: Most are caused by deliberate arson
In peacetime, libraries can also burn down. There are about two hundred library fires a year in the United States, and there are countless library fires around the world. Many accidents are caused by short circuits in wires, overheating fans, damaged coffee pots, lightning strikes and other reasons. In 1764, Mars, who accidentally jumped from a fireplace to the floor, destroyed the Harvard Library. In 1972, an electric spark burst from the short circuit of a floor fan, which destroyed all the books in the library of Temple University Law School. In 1988, one of the largest libraries in the world, the Leningrad Science Library (whose collections began in 1714), was destroyed by fire, losing a total of four million books. Millions of other books were soaked in water and then completely destroyed. The cause is simply poor contact with the wires. When the library caught fire, the firefighters didn't enter the building; they simply parked more than two dozen fire trucks nearby and sprayed water at the building for twenty-four hours straight. When the fire was finally extinguished, a bulldozer rushed to clean up piles of damaged books, intending to dispose of them like garbage, but the ensuing protesters turned it away. After that, protesters collected all the completely wet books that could still be recycled at the scene, took them home, hung them on clotheslines, and tried to repair them. The day after the fire, librarian Vladimir Filov told reporters that only five thousand dollars worth of books had been damaged. As a result, Filov was hospitalized the next day for "heart problems" and then disappeared from the public eye.
Many library fires are caused by accidental acts of vandalism. So many library fires have occurred over the years that even a concrete and tiny cause, such as "a match that was accidentally thrown into a book box and not yet burned out," has caused too many fires. Some people may mistakenly think that the book box is a trash can, but most people do this because they can't find trash cans everywhere, and throwing matches everywhere in the library will definitely be severely punished, so they are forced to sneak matches into the book box, which is obviously foolish. Such fires have become so common over a long time in the past that most library buildings now have bistros whose bibliographic points are separated from the main building. So even if there is a fire in the book box now, the flames will have nowhere to go.
It has long been thought that the main cause of library fires is that smoking is too careless. If smoking is indeed the main cause, then the number of fires should have been drastically reduced in libraries, when in fact the number of fires has increased. Fire investigators are now generally beginning to believe that most library fires were caused by deliberate arson. Arson is a common crime. In 1986, the year the Central Library burned down, there were more than 5,400 arson incidents in Los Angeles. In most cases, arson is for profit – which is quite representative, because someone does burn down their own house to defraud the insurance money. Some fires are done in retaliation for an irreparable relationship or a failed business deal. Many of the fires in government buildings are political stances. People sometimes set fires first and then extinguish them, so that they will appear brave. Firefighters call it "the fire of vanity" or "hero set the fire." Fires are sometimes used to cover up other crimes. That is to say, the prisoner may first commit the murder and then burn the building where the body is located, so that the process of investigating the murder and even determining that it is a murder will become very difficult. (This is one of the most clichéd episodes of a movie script, but it does happen often in real life.) Some fires are lit by people with arsonist disorder, an impulse emotion control disorder that allows them to gain great satisfaction when they see things burning.
Los Angeles Public Library logo and cover of the English edition of Susan Orrin's Dear Library
There was a series of amazingly large fires in Los Angeles. It's a hot, dry, crackling city, a big hearth. Here you can feel the flames simmering in the shallowest areas beneath the surface, provoking and probing among the bushes under the woods; in the dry bushes and dry grass, you can feel the flames that are about to be born waiting there, waiting to burst out. Buildings will burn and hills will burn. The fires in Los Angeles have names: the Thomas Fire, the Latina Fire, the Bird of Pride Fire, and the Station Fire. In the 1980s, a series of fires broke out in and around Los Angeles, and Los Angeles became a city surrounded by thick smoke from burning. The series of fires was triggered by a simple arson device consisting of a lit cigarette, three matches and a rubber band wrapped around a notebook paper. Most arson occurred in the city of Glendale, which borders Los Angeles, where a total of sixty-seven homes were destroyed over the years. There were several fires that even occurred near buildings where fire investigators held meetings, a few at hardware stores, and many more in open spaces. A fire at Warner Bros. Studios destroyed the set of The Waltons. By the mid-1980s, the fires caused by this improvised arson set had cost millions of dollars.
Around this time, John Leonard Orr, a fire captain in Grandale and an expert in arson investigations, wrote a novel. He described the novel, titled "Origins," to the copyright agent as a work based on a series of real arson incidents. "As it really is," he wrote, "the arsonist in my novel is a firefighter." The agent agreed to publish the book on behalf of the agent. When the publisher asked him why the novel bore so many incredible resemblances to the series of arsons that were taking place in Los Angeles, the agent acted rather dismissively, replying with no concern: "What's this, we live in Los Angeles!" Everyone has a stack of scripts or book manuscripts they want to sell. Shortly before the novel was sold to a publisher, a hardware store in Glendale called the Ou lai Building Materials Center was burned down, killing four people. In the novel "Origin", there is a similar plot. Orr's book was published in paperback by a company called Infinite Publishing.
Although Orr was a fire captain, his series of actions deeply disturbed the rest of the Glendale arson investigation team. In order to verify the situation, they quietly installed a tracking device on his car. According to the investigation team, he had driven to the site of the arson before several fires. Finally, his fingerprints were found at an arson site. Orr has always been considered a decent person, but at the same time it seems a little eccentric. As suspicions grew about Orr, detectives dug deeper and discovered that Orr had submitted a job application to the Los Angeles Police Department, but had been rejected by the police, who, after careful evaluation, had identified him as a "schizophrenic." Eventually, Orr was charged with more than two dozen counts of arson and four counts of murder, most of which were convicted. He was supposed to be sentenced to death and was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. He is believed to have set fires in and around Los Angeles totaling more than two thousand. After Orr was taken into custody, the number of fires in the Glendale area was directly reduced by ninety percent.
Los Angeles Public Library after the fire
The fire at the Central Library was not the only time a library had been burned down within the Los Angeles public library system. In 1982, the Hollywood branch was artificially set on fire and has not been resolved to this day. Allegedly, in the beginning, someone caused a small fire near the building, and then the fire got out of control, resulting in a tragedy. The Hollywood branch was so badly damaged that it had to be demolished and rebuilt, and only 20,000 books were preserved. The Central Library also caught fire twice after the Fire of April 1986. In September of the same year, a fire broke out in the middle of the Music and Art Collection, when many books and manuscripts were still on the shelves and were not transported. Compared to the seven-hour-long firestorm in April, the fire was small, and rescuers extinguished it in thirty-six minutes. But fire investigators were puzzled by the cause of the incident. Because, with the exception of salvage personnel and the backbone of the library, the building has been cordoned off to all outsiders. The room where the fire broke out had only one entrance, and a guard came here fifteen minutes before the fire to check it out. A man who happened to be wandering outside the building at the time of the fire was arrested, but it turned out that he chose to wander around the neighborhood only because he was trying to peddle marijuana. The library staff had been frightened by the previous fire, and this time they were frightened by the second fire. A month later, there was another fire in the basement of the library. However, at least one clear reason can be found this time: a staff member of the salvage team accidentally dropped the heating material into the chute in the basement, and the heating material immediately began to burn after falling into the garbage heap.
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