I have had a work in progress for over a year now. Which is to say I’ve been preparing to work on a historical novel for over a year, but I only started writing last week.
[You can read more about my novel in progress here]
The main character of the book is Tessa Kelso, Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) from 1889-1895. Tessa is a compelling figure and, as oxymoronic as it sounds, this was a fascinating time in the development of the public library in the United States. Public libraries had been well established in the east, but the concept of “librarian” as a profession had really only come into being fifteen years earlier at a convention that led to the creation of the American Library Association (ALA) in 1876.
Tessa had no experience as a librarian; but then again, the first library school had only been opened three years earlier at Columbia by Melvil Dewey (of the eponymous Dewey Decimal system). At the time Tessa took over LAPL, it was a loaning library of about 6,000 books, most of them donated and so worn they weren’t suitable for circulation. But the time she left six years later, the library had grown to 42,000 volumes and had nearly 20,000 library card holders.
Tessa was a New Woman of the late-Victoria era who was irrepressibly progressive, outspoken, direct to the point of being offensive, and unconventional in practically every aspect of her life. She earned a reputation in Los Angeles for having “extraordinary business ability, quenchless energy, and great executive force,” in the words of Charles Lummis; she became well-known to librarians nationwide for her progressive innovations, her great wit and humor, and for openly challenging the leadership of the ALA; she also became nationally infamous after suing a pastor for slander when he publicly impugned her reputation in a sermon, asking that his god “cleanse her of all sin and make her a woman worthy of her office.”
The thing about historical novels is that they require a lot of research. For this past year I have been digging into Tessa, the LAPL, and the milieu of fin de siècle Los Angeles in the 1890s (an interesting topic of its own). There is no repository of Tessa Kelso’s papers, no memoirs, not even a diary. But there is a wealth of contemporary newspaper coverage of her tenure at LAPL. Most of my work this past year has been collecting news stories, transcribing and collating them, and sorting through and reconciling sometimes conflicting accounts. I have also spent a lot of time in Los Angeles archives and libraries such as the Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Natural History Museum of Southern California, the Huntington Library in San Marino, the National Archives in Perris Valley, and of course, various departments in the Los Angeles Public Library. I’ve been poring over LAPL library board minutes from the era, copies of the Library Bulletin Tessa and her staff published, proceedings of ALA national conventions . . . It’s been a lot of fun finding so many primary materials and working so many great archivists.
Now all I have to do is to sit down and write the book.
PS. If you’d like to read more about Tessa Kelso, check out this great piece on the LAPL blog: Tessa Kelso: Sinful City Librarian.
