Here’s a book for the librarians among us: Scream at the Librarian: Sketches of our Patrons in Downtown Los Angeles by Joel J. Rane, with illustrations by Raymond Pettibon & Cristin Sheehan Sullivan.

From June 2001 to April 2006, I was a reference librarian in the Literature and Fiction Department of the Central Library, Downtown Los Angeles…

….there are thousands of people in the streets, limping through the doors of the Central Library, beating on the pay phones, not begging for help but demanding to pull the rest of us down into their dark hole. The library is their refuge, four stories up, four stories down into a dark hole. This is the Downtown Los Angeles I knew.

(via Book By Its Cover)