By G. Tracy Mehan, III on 1.4.07 @ 12:07AM
Virginia's wealthy Fairfax Country welcomes in the Dark Ages.
My mother never had the opportunity to attend college. Yet, on
her nightstand, next to her bed, could always be found books by the
likes of a Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, or Robert Louis Stevenson. The
product of parochial schools and an America that still treasured
high-quality literature, my mother breathed the healthy air of
culture not yet polluted by the corrosive effects of the radicalism
of the 1960s, rampant egalitarianism, consumerism, or
postmodernism.
My mother's literary tastes, an inheritance, really, of the
society into which she was born and raised, came to mind as I read
of the purging of the literary classics by the
public libraries in one of America's wealthiest counties,
Fairfax, Virginia.
Evidently, the librarians in Fairfax County have adopted some
hard-nosed marketing practices to give the customers want they want
-- or at least get rid of the titles they don't want.
"We're being very ruthless," said Sam Clay, director of the
21-branch system. "A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of
shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one
is checked out, that's a cost."
Tulips? The list of potential casualties of this new approach
appears to be a bit more shocking than obscure technical
references. The Fairfax libraries are now using new computer
software programs to identify titles that have not been checked out
in 24 months. Victims, to date, include the speeches and writings
of Abraham Lincoln, The Education of Henry Adams, poems of
Emily Dickinson, and, according to the Washington Post's
Lisa Rein, "thousands of novels and nonfiction works" that were
swept up in the computer vacuuming.
Other books that have been "weeded" from the shelves of various
branches of the Fairfax County Public Library system or haven't
been checked out in 24 months and could be discarded include:
The Works of Aristotle, The Sound and the Fury by
William Faulkner, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas
Hardy, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway,
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and The Glass
Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.
Other selections expunged from various branch libraries are
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Harper Lee's To Kill a
Mockingbird, and Virgil's The Aeneid.
Among the more contemporary authors excluded from some libraries
are the likes of Kate Millett, Jack Kerouac, and Maya Angelou.
The top 25 books checked out in December, from Fairfax County
libraries, were best-sellers by John Grisham, David Baldacci, James
Patterson, Nelson DeMille, Stephen King and Alice McDermott, among
others. Most are entertaining, but only a few will be considered
classics in 25 years.
For now, at least, library officials claim they will "always"
stock Shakespeare's plays, The Great Gatsby and other
venerable titles. Moreover, they claim that excluding one title
from one branch still allows a prospective reader to get that title
from another branch where it might still be on the shelves.
"As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic
equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old
books," says Rein. Moreover, the two-year threshold for book
disposal was prompted by a $2 million cut to the library system's
budget for books and materials as well as the demand for computers,
meeting space and story hours that shortchanges, well, books.
Each branch librarian receives a data printout each month,
including every title that has not circulated in the previous 24
months. The librarian has the discretion to either keep or dispose
of the low-demand books as long as he or she meets certain targets.
"What comes in is based on what goes out," says Julie Pringle
collection manager for the Fairfax Public Library system.
This is all very appalling for bibliophiles. True, there are
always financial realities that must be recognized. However, the
Fairfax system is the largest in Virginia. Its FY 2006 budget was over $29 million with a cost per taxpayer of
only $26.80.
Still, do we really want to sacrifice any kind of cultural or
literary stewardship on the part of the librarians in order to give
teenagers another place to surf the Internet or offer the latest
John Grisham novel? Is it worth sacrificing cultivated judgments in
these literary matters to a computer program? Maybe, it is all
becoming a bit too democratic for our own good.
We have come a long way from those dedicated monks who
tirelessly copied the great works of antiquity to save them from
the barbarian hordes for the sake of future generations. Welcome to
Fairfax County and the new Dark Age.
topics:
Education, Books
