Dustbin of Literary History
Katherine Mangu-Ward | January 3, 2007, 12:14pm
Libraries in Fairfax County are consigning Charlotte Bronte, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the dustbin of literary history. At the bidding of a new cataloging program, the libraries are tossing books that haven't been checked out in more than two years to make room for in-demand books.
National Review's John Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asks:
What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?
If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries at all? There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms.
Miller suggests that libraries stop stocking according to what their "customers" want (John Grisham, etc.), since books are cheap and easy to get elsewhere in the era of Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Instead, they "should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends."
kevrob | January 3, 2007, 5:10pm | #
During my 20-year+ career as a bookseller, I often ran into folks in the library business who expected me to be a big supporter of theirs. I would point out to them that a.) they were rarely our customers, buying their books from the same publishers and wholesalers that we did, and that b.) they were actually our competitors, giving the public "for free" what we charged for. I used to joke that while bookstores were whores, libraries were mere sluts, and were taking bread out of our mouths. This comment was, as you might expect, often met with stunned incomprehension, as those on the library side were sometimes almost entirely free of private sector experience.
I can't see how a local video store or CD shop wouldn't consider the local library as unfair competition. I've complained about the goverment-library racket here
before:
1.) Andrew Carnegie made a huge mistake when he designated government bodies as recipients for his library-supporting largess. He should have demanded that the libraries be established as independent educational institutions, free from government influence. .......
3.) My local libraries have free internet access and DVDs, VHS tapes and CDs to loan. Why they are in competition with local video stores I'll never know, but they are.
Perhaps government libraries should skew their holdings of audio and video to educational materials, and leave the pure entertainment to the commercial outfits. Back when books were more expensive and harder to get, merchants would start book lending operations, often as part of a bookstore, to supply the public with new fiction. That's because the libraries refused to buy books like that, preferring to spend their budgets on the classics. Nothing as ungenteel as Hemingway would have found its way into our local library in the 1920s, which allowed our city's largest independent bookseller to be born, as a 10-book lending library in the corner of a beauty salon. Nowadays, the bookstore doesn't rent books, but the library does. The most popular "trash fiction" goes for $1 a week.
As for obsolete technical materials like a Windows 3.0 manual, that's
exactly the sort of thing a library ought to preserve. Perhaps it might make more sense to scan it and save it as a .pdf file, if the copyright holder allows it, or if it is in public domain, but if there is any justification for libraries that are tax-funded - and no, I don't think there is - it would be as a preserve for useful knowledge that the market doesn't support.
My preference for privatizing public libraries doesn't mean that I don't use them. After all, I pay for them through my taxes. I will admit that I pretty much stayed out of them for years, as I had lending rights at the bookstores I worked at, along with an employee discount and freebies from the publishers. But when I got out of that racket I took out a card again. I used the computers there very frequently when the hard drive on my home machine died and I was too broke to get it replaced immediately. People aren't reading out-of-collection tomes on library computers. They are reading web pages, reading and writing web-based e-mail, participating in fora, chatrooms and USENET, watching You-tube, playing games - fantasy football, chess, poker - and looking for pictures of cute humans. (The library should seriously invest in some privacy shields.) Those library workstations are also beloved of job seekers and ebayers. Free access to the internet and MS WORD are a good answer to those complaining about a "digital divide." Using a library machine, somebody could get his resume out, get hired, and eventually buy his own computer. Some computerless folk used them to learn how to use a computer, and to shop for one.
Libraries have many purposes other than lending the classics and useful nonfiction, whether they are run privately or by the government. In the town I grew up in, our public library was the mid-point of my walk home from parochial school, and I haunted the place. I come from a large family, and we weren't rich, so our house would sometimes contain dozens of books borrowed by the various siblings and my parents. These days I find myself standing in line behind patrons checking out huge stacks of DVDs, such that I can't believe that there's time enough in a week to watch them all. It's hard not to think that some devolution has taken place.
Kevin
Ken | January 4, 2007, 5:20pm | #
I think it's easy to argue that Bryans constituents are the forefathers of today's Red State conservatives. His brand of fundamentalism is today's religious right. There is a fairly unbroken chain that the fundamentalist movement, which Bryan once led, is the Religious Right which now votes Republican and reads National Review (and is regularly defended in its pages). For a good review of this history see James Hunter's Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation.
You got me on conflating HUAC with McCarthy, but I think my point still stands. He did not use the power of a House Committee, but instead a Senate one, to engage in the usual conservative censorship. Since you find Wikipedia to be a citable source here is an excerpt from Taligunner Joe's entry:
"The subcommittee first investigated allegations of Communist influence in the Voice of America (VOA), at that time a part of the State Department's International Information Agency. Many VOA personnel were questioned in front of television cameras and a packed press gallery, with McCarthy lacing his questions with innuendo and false accusations.[33] A few VOA employees alleged Communist influence on the content of broadcasts, but none of the charges were substantiated. Morale at VOA was badly damaged, with one of its engineers even committing suicide. Ed Kretzman, a policy advisor for the service, would later comment that it was VOA's "darkest hour when Senator McCarthy and his chief hatchet man, Roy Cohn, almost succeeded in muffling it."[34]
The subcommittee then turned to the overseas library program of the International Information Agency. Cohn toured Europe examining the card catalogs of the State Department libraries looking for works by authors he deemed inappropriate. McCarthy then recited the list of supposedly pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the press. The State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some libraries actually burned the newly-forbidden books.[35] Shortly after this, in one of his carefully oblique public criticisms of McCarthy, President Eisenhower urged Americans: "Don't join the book burners. […] Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."[36]
But let's see you play a little defense as well. It's pretty clear that NR writers support the community standards test to prosecute 'obscenity.' Do you have some kind of doubt that when Ulyssess, Fanny Hill, Tropic of Cancer, etc., were banned that they were so because they had failed some communities standard? Do you think that a community should define for individuals in its legal jurisdiction what can be read?
http://www.nationalreview.com/19nov01/buckley111901.shtml
