Library Style Versus Substance

There can be no more perfect example of why Los Angeles has a worldwide reputation as a community for which style is more important than substance than the new Studio City public library (“New Look for Books,” Feb. 24). Here we have a “pretty building,” designed apparently to remind the residents of Studio City of the ocean, a fascination with which would presumably have encouraged said residents to live in Santa Monica. Inside is a vast, sterile space. There is certainly plenty of room because there are no books. The new library is twice the size of the old but has 5,000 fewer books. Unless you want to use the Internet, browsers are unwelcome. Even the reference section has been decimated in the interest of progress.

What happened to the “old” books? What is the point of telling the average casual reader who comes into a public library to borrow a book that it must be ordered by computer and will, in time, arrive from a distant library?

Apparently a group calling itself Friends of the Studio City Library have some responsibility for this atrocity, which on a local level is comparable to the Taliban destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.

Might I suggest formation of a new group, Enemies of the Studio City Library, which instead of removing books will lobby to remove funding and the positions of those who believe that books have no place in a library.

ANTHONY SLIDE

Studio City