DOROTHY LAZARD: BEHIND THE DESK AT THE MAIN

Behind the Desk at the Main details the promise of public libraries in a fractured world.

When Dorothy Lazard became a public librarian, she returned to the building that had shaped her life from childhood. At the flagship branch ("the Main") of the Oakland Public Library, she connected with her hometown to a degree that few people experience. Helping her fellow community members and ultimately becoming the keeper of Oakland's public history archives, she witnessed the joys and dilemmas that shape one of the most diverse cities in the US.

In Behind the Desk at the Main, Lazard takes readers through the day-to-day life of library work with love, wit, and candor. As the cracks in American society grow and our public institutions are strained to the breaking point, libraries remain the cherished containers of our ideals: They are places of curiosity, imagination, memory, and togetherness. Lazard reveals the pressures that library workers face—from economic crises to book bans and political upheaval—as they uphold these ideals in a fractured world.

Filled with humor and urgency, Behind the Desk at the Main is a testament to the power of books and community in a time of division.

Dorothy Lazard is a writer, public historian, and former librarian. She is celebrated for her library career at the Oakland Main Library and for her 2023 memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, that tells the story of her youth in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, connecting her early intellectual pursuits to the career that made her a community pillar.

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