Sexy Librarians

In his discussion of censorship, Paul Starr spares a paragraph to illuminate us on the function as libraries as de facto censors of books. He says, "Donors sought to make books available for free in a controlled environment under the authority of a librarian with sober and refined taste [my emphasis] . . . The purpose of libraries, in [the American Library Association's] view, was not entertainment but education and self-improvement" (249). I feel like this perspective of libraries persists, although, from my 5 years of experience working in a sizable-but-struggling public library, it is not entirely accurate anymore. I don't mean to criticize Starr's information. Instead I'd like to elaborate upon it in our current historical context.

While around the turn of the century, libraries censored (by excluding them from their collections) books based on their lack of information and inability to educate, the current trend is quite the opposite. The librarians that I knew (none of which were sexy or "sober and refined in taste," unfortunately) ordered books instead on the ironic combination of entertainment and popularity. As the only means by which a patron could "check out" items, I handled everything (along with my coworkers, obviously) that legally left the library, and the bulk of what I checked out were DVDs, VHS, and CDs. The audiovisual department was by far our busiest, rivaled only by Children's books, which I'd attribute to the fact that one parent would get 50 books at a time. People were especiallymanic to get their movies and some would be legitimately angry when I had to tell them that they couldn't get more than 10 each of DVDs and VHSs. That library was a hub of entertainment, and I was rarely, although pleasantly, surprised when a patron actually wanted to read a novel. Librarians ordered items to meet this demand.

Yet they also met the demand with another perspective in mind: popularity. As an institution that was having trouble passing regular operating levies, the library tries to justify its operations and catalog by "giving the people what they want," as the the aphorism goes. Librarians would search Amazon.com and the NY Times bestseller lists for input. The strategy seems to work, but it also leaves the library with an excess of copies after a book's star has faded. Librarians have sexed up the catalog, but this diverts funds from diversifying the library's catalog and also curtails the purchase of more perennial materials. It also means that more obscure titles stand little chance of becoming available to that public.

What this amounts to, in my opinion, is commercial censorship. In this model, if a book isn't profitable for the publishers, then it probably won't be accessible to the general reader. I can't help wondering what books this has barred from the public, and I've noticed already that I've had to rely in Interlibrary loans to order even my pleasure reading over the past year (which, admittedly, isn't very popular). The point is, and this can probably be historically as well as statistically substantiated, that the popularity and sell-ability of a book does not determine its merit in a given field. While I can't argue that a public would even notice if more of these books were in its library, I would argue that they should at least have the access to them. That is why commercial censorship seems to be just as much as a restriction on information as legal censorship, especially in a country currently so moved to privatization and deregulation.