Libraries

Kathy Carbone remembers the twinge of trepidation she felt when she was asked to help create a library in the tiny, east-central African nation of Rwanda. "Oh my God, what have I just signed up for?" she recently said, recalling her initial reaction. "I felt overwhelmed. I had never created a library." Carbone, the performing arts librarian at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, realized she faced an enormous task.

A room without books, says Los Angeles interior designer Peter Dunham, is "a tragedy. It feels unfinished, like there is no intellectual presence." In a city derided for its cerebral shortcomings, the home library -- once merely a quaint signature of old money -- is asserting itself as a showcase for personal taste, designers say.

Once a month, the San Fernando Library's librarians trade their reading glasses for video-game controllers and invite children to come crank up the volume. Elias Ponce and about a dozen teenagers shuffle past the stacks of books to the youth section and play "Guitar Hero," a game that lets them pretend they're in a rock band. "It makes the library a fun place," said Ponce, a 13-year-old eighth-grader who says he now goes to the library every day even when there are no games.

The Queens Library branch here sits at the intersection of five avenues, amid an array of Afghan, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese businesses in this busy borough downtown. It's an appropriate spot for a library whose clientele is overwhelmingly made up of immigrants from Asia and whose purpose is the intersection of conventional book and information services and help for the newly arrived. To Paul Xinye Qiu, the library's assistant manager, the Queens Library is more than a place to borrow books.

A Long Beach City Hall proposal to close its main library has triggered a backlash from downtown residents and their supporters, including author Ray Bradbury, who accused the port town of being "at war with the printed word and books." "Tell City Hall NO to the threatened closure!" Bradbury implored in a letter published last week in the Press-Telegram.

In her eyes, they are all daughters and sisters. The waifish 18-year-old, already married and a mother, but with a hunger to learn. The pair of shy high school students, nervous at first, but soon browsing eagerly through the bookshelves. The matronly homemaker, unsure and uneducated, but discovering the world beyond the slums of southern Tehran by reading Feodor Dostoevski and Jean-Paul Sartre. For the women in her neighborhood, Nazanin Gohari has become a savior of minds.

On a recent morning, television journalist Heather Downie was carrying so many books, CDs and DVDs that it looked as if she'd need a shopping bag to get them to her car. But she wasn't at Borders or Blockbuster. She was perusing the aisles of the Los Feliz branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, a place she's been visiting a lot more lately to save money.

The British Library has put on display the notebook in which William Blake wrote one of his most famous poems, "The Tyger," to mark the 250th anniversary year of the English poet and artist's birth. The British Library also has posted online a digital version of Blake's manuscript notebook, in which he made sketches and drafted his poems for more than 30 years.

It took him nearly 47 years, but Robert Nuranen finally returned his overdue library book. He also insisted on paying the library's late fee -- all $171.32 of it. A social studies teacher at Pacoima Middle School, Nuranen returned the book, "Prince of Egypt," to his hometown library in Hancock, Mich., because he figured it was the right thing to do. That, and he wanted to finally be rid of it. "I mean, I've probably had overdue library books before," Nuranen said, "but nothing to this degree."

More than a quarter of the faculty at Southern Methodist University on Thursday demanded a referendum on whether the Dallas campus should become the home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, if that means accepting a conservative think tank as part of the deal.