|As our dear Alan wrote in our December Paper Jam, curating your own personal library, is a joy beyond comparison.
I write this article, basing it upon Alan’s because a few weeks back, I heard the awful news of a library in Canada culling all books published before 2008. Now, while it was a high school library, within a public school district, and it was not a public library, it is still a deplorable act of the erasure of history. But it is not just this high school library in Canada, public libraries all over America continually throw out old books, simply because they are not “checked out” frequently enough to keep them within their collection. And this is clearly an issue. We have public libraries culling books for political purposes, satisfying the DEI requirements (I do not understand how removing Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Anna Frank, or Ursula K Le Guin helps “diversify” or “include” marginalized groups) or because they simply are “too old” or nobody checks them out anymore. What is a library if not an archive?
Very recently, when bumming around on eBay looking at old first editions that I fancy to collect, I saw to my displeasure, someone selling my favorite book, Black Snow by Mikhail Bulgakov… Now, that in itself is not an offensive crime, however, it was the stamp across the inlay that horrified me. “WITHDRAWN” and there it was, in library binding. An original 1967 first edition of Black Snow, a black comedy masterpiece, was withdrawn from the public library.
So many books fall victim to the culling of books.
These books are not ‘banned’, they are not forbidden by any fascist regime, but they fade away nonetheless in our age of anti-intellectualism. We hardly read literature in public school anymore, it is all going away.But that is for another Paper Jam, or perhaps some pamphlet or speech from a soap-box.
For right now, I must write about how important it is to craft yourself a library. My room is my library, I have around 320 books, the oldest being from 1894, and multiple copies of the same book and their alternate translations… I feel preserving all of this is rather important. My library is not a trophy room of what I have read, but a treasure trove of all that I am yet to read. I have paid a terrible price for all of that knowledge…! (My paycheck). But I feel it is worth every penny.
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