Library Volunteers, Staff Hard at Work on ‘Huge Jigsaw Puzzle’

In a cluttered downtown workroom, Hector Quimby stared eagerly at more than 10,000 dirty books.

His mission was to clean up the literature--but his weapon was a damp sponge, not a censor’s pen.

Quimby, 21, is one of 250 city library employees who, along with more than 400 volunteers, are busy preparing the temporary home of the Central Library for its scheduled opening in mid-spring.

On eight floors of the elegant former Design Center at 433 S. Spring St., 1.8 million volumes will be housed, mainly in open stacks, until the landmark Central Library that was ravaged by two arson fires in 1986 reopens in about three years.

The current move, long delayed as authorities dickered over sites and lease terms, is massive. While the new locale may be temporary, library officials said, it will nonetheless function as the largest public library in the Western United States.

“This is no Mickey Mouse operation; I don’t like to even call it temporary,” library spokesman Robert G. Reagan emphasized. “It is the Central Library in its temporary location.”

With thousands of books that were packed in haste after the devastating fires arriving daily from three warehouses and two giant refrigeration facilities, Reagan compares the effort to making “a huge jigsaw puzzle come together.”

Adding to the logistical challenge is the fact that librarians still do not know exactly which books they will have available to house on their portable, metal shelves. The two fires destroyed 400,000 volumes and damaged another 700,000, so librarians are completing their inventory only as the books arrive in hundreds of moving cartons.

Coordinates Move

“We’re saying the shelving should go here, here and here,” sighed principal librarian Leslie Nordby, who is coordinating the move. “But it’s based upon nothing. We still don’t have a good idea of what was in the freezers.”

The library rented the industrial freezers, which usually house frozen foods, to prevent mold and mildew from growing in books that suffered water damage. Last fall, the books were transfered to a Saugus drying chamber for what officials labeled the largest book-drying project ever. That, in turn, has led to the colossal cleaning operation.

Trucked to Spring Street on 5-foot-square pallets, the books are moved by elevator to a ninth-floor processing center in a former furniture design showroom.

For seven days a week since late November, work crews in this nerve center have cleaned and catalogued each volume, many of which are curled or sooty from water and smoke.

“Some of them that come in are really black, with a lot of ash deposits all over,” said library clerk Quimby, whose blue shirt grew progressively dirtier as he scrubbed the cover of a volume entitled “Silver Bay Conference on Human Relations in Industry 1951-1954.” “But this is something you’ll tell your grandchildren that you were a part of.”

Beehive of Activity

The block-long processing center, in which stacks of half-opened moving cartons stood piled in no discernable order, is a constant beehive of activity.

In one corner, 10 employees and volunteers, several sporting radio headphones and surgical masks, sponged spines and covers one afternoon this week.

At the other end of the brightly lit room, a group of volunteers matched the clean books to index cards in the library’s imposing shelf list. In cases where cards could not be located, they made out new handwritten cards in order to complete a full inventory.

Such work is seen as drudgery by most library employees. But the volunteers worked with a sense of mission that made the hours pass quickly.

“It’s boring, but so are a lot of things in life,” asserted Ellie Shanahan, a free-lance fashion stylist who is between jobs. “I believe in books, so I think it’s important that the library get back in order as soon as possible. And this gives me something to do instead of sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.”

Catching Up on History

The work also gave volunteers a chance to sneak quick peeks inside the eclectic tomes, which the other day ranged from a sewage disposal guide to an atlas of India.

“You catch up on your history--I just went through the Korean War with the USS Manchester,” said Jean Wallace, a retired telephone operator from Hollywood.

Unfortunately, hundreds of books and magazines fail to make it past the processing center.

Those deemed not salvagable by the cleaning crew are placed on wooden book carts for a detailed perusal by principal librarians. If a second, cleaner copy is already in the library’s collection, or, in the case of periodicals, the material is available on microfilm, damaged volumes are thrown into the garbage.

“It is not a cavalier process,” emphasized Pat Kiefer, the processing center’s co-manager, as she picked up a dilapidated copy of “What Color Is My Parachute.” The book’s cover, once orange, was now black. “I know that we have several other copies in better shape,” Kiefer explained, before tossing the book back in the discard bin.

Use Shopping Carts

Books that survive the processing procedure are re-loaded into cartons and moved, by department and serial number, to the proper floor for shelving. There, workers employ shopping carts donated by Vons markets for the final filing.

“It’s somewhat disheartening not doing your professional work,” said Jack Vargas, an arts and music department employee as he pored through copies of American Painting Contractor magazine. “But what keeps us going is the goal of reopening the library.”

Currently, the only portion of the temporary library open to the public is a nine-month-old, 3,000-volume Book Stop on the ground floor, which stocks best sellers, travel and children’s books.

Roughly one-fourth of the shelving for the full-service temporary library has been completed, including the entire history, arts and music collections--housed in an ornate, marble-columned hall on the second floor of the 60-year-old building.

This weekend, a shelving party is scheduled for the children’s literature section on the ground floor of the temporary library. As always, the library is seeking additional volunteers to assist in the task. (Those interested may call 612-3261.)

Depend on Volunteers

“There is a direct correlation between the number of volunteers and the timing of the (still undetermined) opening date,” Reagan said.

With a new building--rented for $8.3-million for 54 months--and $10-million in new books from the Save the Books fund-raising effort, library officials said, they are eager to get off to a fresh start on Spring Street.

But they concede that the legacy of the 1986 fires will live on in the campfire smell and warped shape of many of the books on the new shelves.

“When people use the library, they’ll notice some of the books look a little strange,” Reagan said. “But they must remember, the books have a history.”