Early twentieth-century Los Angeles was a hotbed of art and music. Painters, sculptors, musicians, craftsmen, writers, photographers, dancers, and the motion picture industry were thriving. Gladys…
Sunyi Dean (she/her) is a biracial fantasy author who was born in Texas, grew up in Hong Kong, and now resides in North England. She writes speculative fiction with a weird slant. Her new novel is The…
Lee Goldberg is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than seventy novels. His latest novel is Murder by Design, and he recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times—the book was better! There's nothing like debating the differences between a favorite book and its translation to the screen.
Moving the contents of the Los Angeles Public Library from the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Metropolitan Building, the library’s home from 1914 to 1926, to its new Central Library…
As we spend the year commemorating the centennial of Central Library, it's also necessary to acknowledge a less celebratory, but still important milestone—the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Central…
In late November 1970, Abigail Lois Cleaves, a Los Angeles resident of more than fifty years, passed away. Gail (as she was more commonly known) had been a Civil Engineer with the Los Angeles County…
In this episode of the Past Due podcast, we’ll discuss how the Library came to be built, an early architectural mystery about the library, and some of the intriguing details about one of the oldest books in the Library’s collection. Transcript
Join the librarians of the Los Angeles Public Library as they revisit interactions with notable patrons, talk about L.A. History with Angel City Press, and dive into the mystery of Against the Grain, Inc. Angelenos from all walks of life have visited the Library, including a few notable patrons…
This third program in our AI series focused on the critical issue of inherent biases in AI technologies, especially as they are deployed in law enforcement, healthcare, government, and education. We took a look at how these biases manifest and their profound implications.
Central Library opened to the public in July 1926. On January 29, 2026, to kick off the library's centennial year, a time capsule that was placed in the building's cornerstone during the original construction was unveiled to the public for the first time.
Alice Bucknell's video work, The Alluvials, was born of research in the Los Angeles Public Library. Now playing on the Library's immersive Central Library Video Wall, The Alluvials explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future version of Los Angeles. The story is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city's celebrity mountain lion, P-22.
