A week ago, I wrote about a book that the Times book critic Dwight Garner favorably reviewed, called “Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018.” It’s an anthology of letters and journals edited by David Kipen. It gives an expansive view of a city that can sometimes seem unfathomable. Mr. Garner writes that “the book deepens and expands and flyspecks our view of Los Angeles.” I asked Mr. Kipen about how you encapsulate a place like L.A. Here’s what he said (lightly edited for space).

What was the first text you read that made it into the book?

I found it in the enchanted U.C.L.A. Special Collections Library. They have the diaries of Glenn T. Seaborg in there, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of plutonium, who grew up in an L.A. County suburb called South Gate. On June 7, 1927, before he went to bed, Seaborg — one of the fathers of the atomic bomb — sat down and wrote only five words in his diary: “School. Made fire by friction.”

That’s when I knew I had a book.

What was the most surprising thing you found over the course of putting the book together?