One Small Voice: There’s a better way to handle books

by Lynn Mandaville

For at least five generations, at least two of them behind me, and two of them ahead of me, my family has regarded public libraries as egalitarian wonders of civilization.

At a time in the 1950s, when buying books was limited to one Little Golden Book for three little girls – not each – per week, for the princely sum of 25 cents at the grocery store check-out line, the public library allowed us access to nearly limitless stacks of magnificent children’s books throughout our summers, and supplemental leisure reading during the school year.

It provided my grandmother slews of large print novels while she was in her 70s and 80s, endless stacks of historical novels for my mother, and spy novels for my father, and, later, 125 books per year for each of my sons throughout first and second grade as they perfected their early reading skills.

It is largely accepted that Benjamin Franklin first conceptualized the idea of the free public library in America.  But libraries have existed for millennia as repositories of the collected historic records of nations, and the creative works of societies’ playwrights and poets, dating back to the 7^th century in Nineveh in contemporary Iraq, and at the great Egyptian library at Alexandria that held as many as 700,000 scrolls and papyri from regions as diverse as Greece, Persia, India and other civilizations of the Middle East.

Andrew Carnegie is credited with funding the building of 1,689 libraries in the United States between 1883 and 1929.

Countless other benefactors also have been responsible for establishing public libraries in towns across America, including the Henika District Library in Wayland (established in 1899 through a bequest of Julia H. R. Henika).

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”

So goes the quote attributed to Jo Godwin, an American librarian from North Carolina.

This somewhat titillating observation about libraries reflects what ought to be true for all public libraries, specifically that a great library collection should reflect the wide disparity of demographics which make up the users of that library.

Its materials – whether print, audio, or video, or other unique items – should appeal to men and women, adults and children, various ethnicities and nationalities, religious affiliations, or lack thereof, sexual orientations, disabilities, talents, vocations, avocations, and so on.

What appeals to one may not appeal to all.  And some of what is offered may cause discomfort or disdain in a segment of library users.

But there’s a great thing about America that makes it all right for any given part of what’s in the public library to give offense.

America is a patchwork quilt of the world’s peoples.  And America’s Constitution guarantees that there is a division between churches and the government to protect the people from a theocracy that could limit or curtail the information or entertainment available to each citizen according to his or her preferences.

There is another great thing about public libraries that allows all citizens to make requests for the reconsideration of materials held within a local library.

Every user of a public library (and even school libraries) may register displeasure with material and make a civil request for that material to be reassigned to a different area within the library’s collections, or to be pulled from the library altogether.

The process is thorough, but it isn’t so convoluted as to make it difficult for anyone to pursue action.

Basically, a complainant completes a form that supplies pertinent data about the material (title, author, format, sections or pages the complainant finds offensive), a brief narrative as to why the complainant takes issue with the material, and the specific action he or she is requesting.

From there, the form goes to the library’s board of directors, which appoints a committee to review the material in its entirety, and to research any reviews or awards that may exist about the material (such as reviews by Publisher’s Weekly or news media, and awards such as the Newberry Award or Caldecott Medal).

The committee generally includes several members of the governing board, a library professional, and a couple of members of the community at large.

Usually, the committee is expected to complete its work within a fairly short time frame (a week to ten days) so that it can make a recommendation to the library board (or board of education) at its next scheduled meeting.

The board reviews and discusses the recommendation of the committee and makes a final decision regarding the material in question.  They will declare the item to be removed from the collection, relocated to a different collection within the library (or to a different school within the district, such as to a building housing a higher grade level of students), or to be retained.

It is understood that the decision of the library board (or board of education) is final, and the complainant agrees to abide by that decision.

The reason I’m taking the time to explain this process is that in recent years some people have felt they have no other recourse than to create a public hubbub over items that get their panties in a bunch. Instead of inquiring if there is a civil way to express one’s displeasure with library material, they go right to taking matter into their own hands.

There are several ways I have encountered that people use to bring attention to material they don’t like:

• Sometimes someone will check out the material in question and simply refuse to return it.

• Sometimes people in a group agree to keep the item in a perpetual state of being checked out to a member of that group so that people outside the group have no access to the material.

• And sometimes people resort to book burning, the most extreme form of banning material from the library-using community.

In my opinion, it is unreasonable for anyone in a democratic society to resort to methods other than the request for reconsideration.

Some new forms have arisen of challenging materials that put to shame any of the methods mentioned above (except for the book burning).

An example of this new means of depriving a community of library materials can be seen in the actions of one Mayor Gene McGee of Ridgeland, MS, who has refused to release the first-quarter payment of legally earmarked finances from the city to the library. He states as his reasoning for withholding more than $100,000 from the library that, as a Christian, he requires the removal of “homosexual materials” from the library before funding can be remitted.

Mayor McGee has been the mayor of Ridgeland since 1989, but it is only recently that he has expressed, “There is a minimum, sexual connotations are not appropriate for children when they enter the library.”

First and foremost, Mayor McGee has no authorization to withhold funding to the Ridgeland library.  It is the Ridgeland board of Aldermen who hold that power.

Second, the Mayor already has the right as a private citizen to participate in whatever local process is in place for Mr. McGee to request the reconsideration of the LGBTQ+ materials with which he is so uncomfortable.

Those two facts should put an end to the hullaballoo in that town.

One of the titles getting lots of press nationwide right now is the graphic novel Maus by Art Speigelman.

Maus was first introduced in 1978 through which Spiegelman relates his father’s reminiscences as a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust during World War II.

Maus was subsequently serialized from 1980 to 1991 in the avant-garde magazine of comics and graphic novels called Raw. 

Maus is the only graphic novel to receive a Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded in 1992.

Reminiscent of George Orwell’s famous novel Animal Farm, all the characters in Maus are animals, most notably with mice representing the Jews and cats representing the Germans.

This is an important distinction because one of the most common complaints about Maus is nudity.  Since mice are the beings who are led naked to the gas chambers, it seems absurd to me to challenge the book on the basis of animal nudity.

But it is what it is.

It is just my take on things, but I think Maus is just another of those books whose historical topics create intense unease in the reader, and right now Americans seem much too squeamish to face historical fact and then talk about it.

During my tenure as director of the Henika Library, and during my five years serving on the Wayland board of education, I was part of three formal requests for reconsideration of library materials.

All three times the system worked.

Thorough formal requests were received and reviewed, recommendations were made to the governing boards, and those boards acted on the recommendations.

Though not all complainants were satisfied with the outcomes of their filings, all listened respectfully to the recommendations of the committees, and attempted to understand the rationales used in reaching the final dispositions.

Those who choose to circumvent the systems in place to handle materials complaints with grandstanding, protests, and civil disobedience in the form of withholding library funding are doing so more to make a political statement than to look out for the welfare of the library-using community.

In my opinion, those who jeopardize the unique and invaluable institution of free public libraries and the principles upon which they are established are un-American.

Ours is a nation built on rules, standards and systems intended to serve everyone, and that includes both those for whom the status quo is fine and dandy, as well as those who find an itch that needs scratching.

One need not act out inappropriately like Mayor McGee in Ridgeland, MS, to be heard in a way that is fair and respectful.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that this nation, coming out of a protracted couple of years in which we lost a bit of our old good habits, make an effort to solve its differences through more polite means.