Libraries and Learning
Burning Issues for Operation 451
January 4, 2017
A lot of people were disgusted when they heard Simon & Schuster will publish a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, a notorious right-wing troll who makes a career of offending people and hounding his chosen enemies through mass intimidation. He has even been banned from Twitter, which is incredibly difficult to do. He tried to offend his publishers with grotesque jokes as well, to no avail. They really wanted to publish his book.
In my library circles, the debate around this book is whether libraries should refuse to subsidize his aggressive bigotry and risk offending a large percentage of their communities, or if they should buy the book so people can form their own opinions – and risk offending a large part of their communities. It’s his schtick. It’s how he makes a living.
For librarians, it’s a case study in how to interpret what we value and how we enact those values in practice. It’s not all that difficult a dilemma for academic librarians; we can buy a copy and assume people will accept that it’s okay to spend a few bucks on a book that will serve as a primary source for understanding trolls; even if what the troll says is offensive, it’s documentation of our contemporary culture. Books are rarely challenged in academic libraries, but in public libraries, it’s another story. If there’s a demand for a book, they may buy dozens of copies to avoid having hold lists running into the hundreds, so we’re talking about more than a few bucks. We’re also talking about money that, once spent, can’t be used to make the library shelves more diverse, less dominated by the latest celebrity thing. People have a tendency to think that if a public library buys a book, they endorse what it has to say. And everyone feels they have a say in how their local tax dollars are spent. It’s a real dilemma, if possibly short-lived. Books like this tend to end up in the book sale bin when interest wanes, as it will.
As it happens, I’ve been poking around in the history of American libraries lately and it has been illuminating to see how our established values evolved over time. In the early days (1870s – 1930s) we relied on faith. The “library faith” was the notion that reading was beneficial for both individual enlightenment and for democracy because reading would create an informed public. In the beginning this meant censorship of “addictive” and “mind-weakening” popular fiction in favor of improving non-fiction. Almost immediately a compromise had to be negotiated with the masses, who didn’t want anyone telling them what to read. Eventually the library faith included a democracy of reading tastes.
It wasn’t until the end of the 1930s that defending intellectual freedom became an article of library faith. An Iowa librarian, disturbed by the rise of fascism and the burning of books in Europe, wrote a Library Bill of Rights which was adopted by the American Library Association a year later in 1939. It took