The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both.

At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage.

Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels like a marvelous and exceptional thing. All the things that are wrong in the world seems conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here is my story, please listen; here I am, please tell me your story.