By intermixing three types of descriptive writing – objective third-person narration, unadorned dialogue, and quotation – Kees forces the reader to collaborate with him line by line in judging each character and incident. This piece also shows one technique Kees had learned from the modern masters of literature and cinema, namely how to condense a short story or poem by eliminating all unnecessary transitions and leaving in only the central observations or images. … In "Public Library" Kees uses montage to create a devastating documentary of a parochial cultural institution in a manner all the more convincing because of its ironic impersonality.