Books are not ephemera

Or, at least, they shouldn’t be.  But, apparently, at my local library, that’s changing.  Books my 7th grader loved over the past several years, it seems, my younger son won’t be able to enjoy, because of the library’s extreme deaccessioning policy.  And it’s tragic, it’s wasteful, and it’s emphasis on what’s new over what will be enjoyed in the long-term is a great loss.

My younger son, earlier this year, finished reading the Harry Potter series.  Happily, we had the set at home, a Christmas present from a couple years ago.  He then read the Percy Jackson series, which he practically inhaled because he enjoyed it so much.  We had that series at home, too, from a birthday present.  Last night he finished it, so I took him to the library, expecting to, as we did with his older brother, check out the first couple books of the Heroes of Olympus series, from the multiple copies in the library.

Except we couldn’t.  Sure, there were a dozen copies of book three on the shelf, but none of books one or two — and, in fact, when we placed a hold, we saw that, for book two, there were only three copies, compared to the dozen copies of the more recently published books.  There were also inconsistent numbers of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

“That’s OK,” I told my son.  “Your brother also really liked Brandon Mull’s books.  Let’s see about the Fablehaven series.”  Except that there were a grand total of three Brandon Mull books available.  The Fablehaven books had been culled down to one copy of each book in the series, and books 1, 3, and 5 were checked out, which’ll make it very difficult to read, if you have to wait repeatedly for the books to come off hold, in order. Mull’s Beyonders series was also down to one copy, with each book in the series checked out.  His Five Kingdoms series, the newest, had two or three copies, and only one of the four books was available.

So we ended up with one book checked out, The Mysterious Benedict Society, and I came home thoroughly irritated.

I asked my son to list all the series he’s read and loved over the years.  This is his list:

Harry Potter

Percy Jackson

Heroes of Olympus

Fablehaven

The Beyonders

Five Kingdoms

The Mysterious Benedict Society

Ranger’s Apprentice

The Last Apprentice

Brotherband Chronicles

Inkheart/Inkspell/Inkdeath

Ender’s Game

and he’s sure there are more.

I expressed my frustration to the librarian (I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice about it, but, well, I didn’t cause a scene anyway), and she tried to direct us to a new series that just came out, which is completely missing the point.  Why should each of these be read for a season, and then discarded?  Why can’t the best of these be kept, and the memory of treasured books be passed down to younger brothers?

And it’s not about space — there’s plenty of space in the library.  In fact, they deliberately keep the shelves half-full, saying that it makes browsing easier.  (Um, no, it doesn’t.)  But even if space were tight, the library is flush with cash, and could acquire off-site storage at minimum cost, so that second copies of books, or less-read books, could be retrieved quickly.

Of course, this wasn’t my first encounter with the deaccessioning policy.  Some years ago, I read a compelling Holocaust memoir, written in hiding by a Jewish policeman, after the ghetto was closed and before he ultimately met his death, too.  Titled Am I a Murderer?, he wrestled with the fact that he had sent others to their deaths, in the hope (ultimately in vain) of saving his own wife and child.  And he describes (this really stayed with me) observing others, who had been on the run or hiding from the Nazis, so worn by these attempts, that they turned themselves in and walked to certain death because of the exhaustion of trying to hide.  It was really quite an astonishing book — and it was deaccessioned when I tried to find it to re-read.

Eventually, based on the criteria that any given book must have a certain number of checkouts, most Holocaust memoirs will disappear, because, while they’re valuable as a body of literature, there are a few famous ones, and a larger number which individually might not draw as many readers.  Periodically I think I should regularly check out Clara’s War (think Ann Frank except being confined to a dirt crawl space rather than a “secret annex”) just so it doesn’t meet the same fate, even if I return it immediately afterwards.

And my son’s books:  I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that after Harry Potter, the whole genre of older elementary/middle school fantasy series fiction, really exploded — which again means that any one series doesn’t meet the criteria for frequency of checkouts, so they all get lost.

Which is a waste.  An terrible waste, for children’s books to become no more lasting and meaningful than the genuinely disposable romance novels elsewhere in the library, and for children to lose the notion of books as something special.  What’s that old bookmark quote?  Ah, yes:  “A book is a gift you can open again and again” (attributed to Garrison Keillor).  Eh, apparently, it’s now “a book is a gift you can open once or twice, until it’s deaccessioned.”

And it’s not just that the love of books is getting lost.  The library is essentially promoting a consumerist culture, valuing what’s new and recent and discarding the idea of lasting value.  It’s like fashion, I guess, and a book I read a while ago described the move from long-lasting high-quality clothing to items that are disposable, and of poor enough quality that even thrift stores don’t sell them, but ship them off to Africa.  In the same way, at the same time as the library very quickly deaccessions books, it acquires very large numbers of copies of new items.  Guess how many copies of The Martin DVD there are?  49 standard DVD, plus 34 Blu-ray.

A couple years ago, my son decided he wanted to build his own personal library of books.  I discouraged him, figuring he could always check out what he wanted from the library.  But apparently that’s not the case.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APortland_Central_Library%2C_Oregon_(2012)_-_114_-_Children’s_Library.JPG; By Another Believer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons