SPEAKING VOLUMES

I truly enjoyed Mary McNamara’s “Los Angeles, Bound” (So SoCal, Sept. 15). Being a lover of libraries and having worked as a library volunteer for several years, it brought back memories of the old Ocean Park branch, still on Main Street, that I loved to go to when I was about 11.

In those days Fu Manchu stories were among everybody’s favorites, and there were many stories of which I now have a vague recollection but whose titles I’ve forgotten.

The library was my favorite of all places.

Genevieve Foster

La Habra

In her ambiguous-to-disparaging article on various Los Angeles public libraries, McNamara superciliously commented about the Los Feliz branch at 1801 N. Hillhurst St.: “Visiting a library in a strip mall is like calling upon one of Jane Austen’s families of impoverished gentry--everyone involved finds themselves assuring one another that it’s really only temporary. Which it is . . . .”

Let me say that no one in the community is sneering at the facility--for three valid reasons.

l) We were totally “out of circulation” for more than a year, thanks to the January 1994 earthquake.

2) Our prior location (just a few blocks down the street) was about one-third the size of what we now have. Consequently, what is there now is a wonderful step upward, even if we do have “huge photos of Frank Lloyd Wright creations where windows would be.” (In case McNamara failed to notice, we also have photographs from “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Beauty and the Beast” for children, plus a wall devoted to Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” Don’t those count as valid literary credentials?)

3) The groundbreaking for our permanent site, which will be about three times the size of what we have now, is planned for just after the first of the year, with the official opening slated for early 1999.

David R. Moss, President

Friends of Los Feliz Library

Los Angeles