Erroneous Facts Corrode Trust

A simple example often illustrates a greater truth.

I waited over a month to receive The Library Book from my local library. I’ve enjoyed author Susan Orlean in The New Yorker, and the buzz swirling about her latest book made it a must-read for this library aficionado who’s written about the unique and benevolent role libraries play in our society and has visited hundreds of libraries across our nation, including one memorable afternoon at the Los Angeles Central Library, the institution at the heart of Ms. Orlean’s tale. I’m also a fan of immersive journalism: that literary cocktail of historical record and personal observation that serves up a thrilling plot of reality (always stranger than fiction) with memoir intimacy.

Ms. Orlean weaves the tragic 1986 Los Angeles Central Library fire with a broader discussion of the nature and value libraries, embellished with personal anecdotes. I delighted in the concoction. Until, on page 11, a modest statistic struck me false.

Comparing her youthful library experience in Shaker Heights, Ohio, to bringing her son to a local library in Los Angeles, Ms. Orlean writes, “Decades had passed, and I was three thousand miles away…”

My knowledge of U.S geography is perhaps even deeper than my experience in libraries, but it doesn’t take an expert to know that Shaker Heights is not 3,000 miles from Los Angeles. According to Google, it is 2,363 miles. True, we often use the term 3,000 miles to express the coast-coast breadth of the United States, even…