Last week The Paris Review posted my Culture Diary on their blog — parts one and two — which proves that as an LA-based bookish reporter I sometimes get up outrageously early, and that really most everything I do these days seems to be around books. (I went to LCD Soundsystem at the Hollywood Bowl! I swear!)
The picture above isn’t from that week: it’s from the LA Archives Bazaar, which was held Saturday morning at USC. Close to 80 local archives (!) had tables set up in the Doheny Library reading room. There were also panels and discussions, but I was covering the Beverly Hills Literary Escape most of the weekend, and didn’t have time to linger. Instead, I gathered up flyers from places like the Metro Dorothy Peyton Gray Library & Archive (transportation research) and for events like the Sixth Annual Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade – Bankruptcy which dealt with a concept on how to get lawyer’s help through the bankruptcy process and the Eighteenth Century Book Trade, a lecture at the Willam Andrews Clark Memorial Library (I’m SO going to that. I’m not kidding).
It was nice to see the reading room buzzing again. A zillion years ago, when I went to USC — and when I was a dropout who haunted the library — I’d read there sometimes. Last year, though, I was on campus and stuck my head in, and it was cavernously empty. It made me wonder how well the space gets used, now that students can do so much research (not all!) on the internet. Doheny is beautiful, though — if the students don’t want to use it, this alumna would be happy to take up a corner reading.
