Los Angeles Froze Its Library Books and Dried Them in a Space Chamber

On April 29, 1986, a fire broke out in the closed stacks of the Los Angeles Central Library and burned for more than seven hours. About 400,000 books were destroyed. What happened next to the survivors is one of the strangest rescues in library history: they were frozen, then dried in a space chamber.

A Fire, Then a Flood of Water

The alarm rang at 10:52 a.m. About 300 firefighters responded according to a 1986 conservation newsletter (a later LAPL account says more than 350), and 46 were injured, but no one died.

The fire destroyed roughly 20 percent of the library's two-million-volume collection. About half a million more books were badly damaged, and well over half a million were wet.

Soaked books are a race against mold, and the librarians needed somewhere cold to put them fast.

Fourteen Hundred Volunteers

A conservation newsletter published that summer reported that some 1,400 volunteers worked from 4 p.m. on April 30 until midnight on Saturday, May 3. A later LAPL account puts the number of volunteers at 1,700, so the exact figure depends on who counted.

Together they moved about one million salvageable volumes out of the building in 100,000 cardboard boxes.

Dry books from the damaged areas were taken to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The wet ones went somewhere much colder.

Freezing the Books to Save Them

The wet books went to three commercial freezers, and were later consolidated in two of them. Cold storage stops mold from growing and buys time to dry the books properly.

The plan worked. According to the same newsletter, only 1 to 2 percent of the wet books became moldy.

The Space Chamber

Then McDonnell Douglas, the aerospace company, offered to dry books for free in its local space chamber, a vacuum facility normally used to simulate conditions beyond Earth. It was the company's first experience with this kind of job.

By the time of the September 1986 report, the chamber had dried 40,000 books.

The Library Reopens

The building was repaired and expanded, and the "new" Central Library reopened on October 3, 1993. The Los Angeles Public Library says it looked like a phoenix rising from the ashes of that dark April day.

It is still a working public library today, part of a system with 73 locations across the city.