I’m proud to be a new member of a distinguished club: Authors from Indiana who have had a book banned by a public library. Other members include Theodore Dreiser, Kurt Vonnegut, and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.
Someone read one of my books, The Croydon Budget Battle, and decided that it was important enough that people should be able to find it in his local library.
So he bought a second copy and asked the Leach Library in Londonderry (an institution that is 100 percent supported by taxes) to include it in their collection.
After some time had passed, he noticed that it still wasn’t on the shelves or listed in their collection. He started filing Right-to-Know requests, asking about the status of the book and about the process that the library goes through when deciding whether to approve a book.
He learned that it wasn’t just an oversight, that there were discussions about the book. Or rather, there were discussions in email that indicated that other discussions should happen in person — presumably to avoid creating a paper trail that would inevitably end up in his hands.
Finally, tired of the stonewalling, he went to the November 1 meeting of the library’s board of trustees, which I also attended at his invitation.
At the meeting, he recounted his experiences, then asked the director of the library, point blank, to explain why the book hadn’t been accepted into the collection.
He noted that it was by a local author. He noted that the topic — the relationship between school spending and academic achievement — should be of interest to everyone in the state. And he noted that the library was getting it for free.
What happened next was disappointing but entirely predictable: The director invented several excuses, which I’ll go through one by one.
- We only consider authors local if they’re from Londonderry.
After the meeting, we went upstairs and asked where we could find the ‘local authors’ section. We were told that no such section existed. The librarian noted that books by ‘New Hampshire authors’ were sprinkled throughout the entire collection and might be tagged as such.
- The book is already available through inter-library loan.
This is an interesting excuse because most of the books in the Leach Library collection are available through inter-library loans. If this is a disqualifying attribute, why are all those books on the shelves?
Again, we checked to see whether this is true. We made an inter-library loan request at a local library. We were told that one library had a copy but wasn’t loaning it out.
- There’s no demand for it.
It’s a new book. How would people even know to demand it unless they see it in places like their local libraries? Isn’t that one of the things that libraries are supposed to be for, to expose patrons to works they might not otherwise come across?
And there is certainly an interest in the topic. Doesn’t every town have the problem of spending too much on schools to get too little? What could be more relevant?
But this is also an interesting excuse. It is very likely that many of the books on the shelves just sit there for years without ever being checked out by anyone. Shouldn’t those books be removed from the collection if the collection is just supposed to contain books for which ‘there is a demand’?
- It’s self-published.
Interestingly, someone else at the meeting noted that she’d donated nine books ‘about economics, written for children’ and wanted to know why only five of them had made it onto the shelves. She was talking about books from the Tuttle Twins series by Connor Boyack. The others are still sitting in a box, the same box where my book sat until the library returned it to the donor.
Boyack formed a publishing company to publish his books. We formed a publishing company to publish our books. If our books are ‘self-published,’ so are his. But at least some of his are on the shelf, so that can’t be a reason for excluding my book.
- We couldn’t find any reviews.
There are positive reviews on Amazon from verified purchasers. And really, having a resident spend his own money to add a book to the library’s collection — isn’t that about the best review a book could hope to get?
- We have to be mindful of shelf space.
After the meeting, we went upstairs and looked around the shelves. We agreed that, after decades of spending time in dozens of libraries, we’ve never seen one with so much unused shelf space.
So, six excuses, apparently made up on the spot, all of them red herrings — untrue, non-sensical, or irrelevant. The simplest explanation is that the director felt she could give answers that could only be verified later, hoping that the questioner would just go away.
We know this guy. He’s not going to just go away.
The meeting was surprisingly well-attended by both progressives and conservatives. Many of the comments were about ‘book banning,’ and at least two of the speakers mentioned the book Maus (by Art Spiegelman) by name as if it had been removed from the library, but it is still in the online catalog.
But more of the comments had almost nothing to do with books or literacy, focusing on the need for ‘safe, welcoming, inclusive spaces’ for children to hang out in — where they can, perhaps, play with the games and puzzles that seem to be filling up the library’s scarce shelf space.
This sounds familiar. We heard the same sorts of things in Croydon when we tried to shift the focus of schools from extra-curricular activities to academic achievement. This is, in fact, one of the main themes of The Croydon Budget Battle.
What parents seem to want most — and want other people to pay for — aren’t so much schools, libraries, literacy, or learning. They are community centers — places where kids can hang out while their parents are working and maybe indulge in some hobbies, like sports or music.
The simple truth is that any institution that is funded by taxes is inherently political. This means that the people who end up running it will use it to push their own agenda — whether progressive or conservative. So it’s not surprising that the directors of a ‘public library’ are okay with banning books. It would be more surprising if they weren’t.
