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Public Libraries Get Real
January 30, 2007

The Fairfax County Public Library recently removed books by William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn from its shelves. Say goodbye to Ernest Hemingway too. Bravo! One can only hope and pray that William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer are soon to follow. This surprising purge was facilitated by software that alerts librarians to unpopular books that have wasted shelf space for more than 24 months without being checked out.

John J. Miller, a reporter for National Review Online criticized this refreshing development (Wall Street Journal, 1/3/07). After posing the question, “What are libraries for?" he theorized librarians will now “morph into clerks who fill their shelves with whatever their customers want, much as stock boys at grocery stores do.” Miller claims the removal of “classics” will turn libraries into welfare programs for middle class readers. He wonders whether we should have government-run libraries at all.

Join the real world John. You seem to forget the “public” in public libraries. Libraries exist to “serve” the needs of the public and the public is not reading your so-called “classics.” The public is quite capable of determining its own needs. We don’t need librarians to decide “what” we should read (as you suggest), we only need librarians to file the books and periodicals and help us find what we want.

By what criteria is a title categorized as “classic” anyway? Is there some ultra-secret commission that bestows the label “classic” on unpopular, tedious to read, irrelevant books? Or does every literature teacher in the world get to make up his or her own list of “classics?” Actually, I always thought the “classics” were merely the cheapest books our schools could procure in bulk. Enough with the “classics.” I hope libraries nation-wide adopt this purging technique. With any luck, all trace of Edith Wharton will disappear entirely.

We have our Library of Congress to preserve the “classics.” People go to libraries now to read magazines, stay out of the cold and email their friends on the Internet. A good library evolves to serve the needs of its public. The truly progressive libraries sell the unwanted classics at distressed prices and use the proceeds for other more useful library programs. People who want to preserve the classics should go to the library sales and buy them for preservation at home.

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