Imagine picking up an American history textbook and seeing that the Mexican War or the New Deal are left out, empty spaces on the timeline. Or a dictionary minus all words beginning with one letter. Cancel L. Suppress S. Bleep U. How about a map of North America with no Great Lakes? Just five oddly shaped, blank, unexplained, flat land extensions along our Canadian border.
Now, imagine my shock in the Newbury Public Library when the young librarian responded to my inquiry by turning to her laptop and saying, “Let me see if this library carries books by that author.”
She looked up when I high-pitched a spontaneous reaction: “This is an American public library! ‘That author’ is Herman Melville. Herman Melville! How can he not be here, not a single book?”
Alarmed, she turned back to her laptop and hurriedly repeated the same answer. Verbatim, as if programmed: “Let me see if this library carries books by that author.”
Something made me step backwards. I waved a hand back toward her and said, “No, no, forget it, I’m sorry,” and quickly reeled out the door.
That something had to be the realization that we now have people graduating from American colleges with degrees in Library Science who do not recognize the names of writers who have shaped American ideals and values.
The trend was already apparent. My Daily News columns about weeding in the Newburyport Public Library in the summers of 2022 and 2023 drew responses from Newburyport Public Library patrons who also noticed. One noticed it in the periodical section.
Two years ago, NPL’s weeding took aim at its Archival Center. In June of this year, the recently installed head librarian, Kevin Borque, estimated that 287 items have been removed from the center.
That turned into an all-too-public hot mess currently the subject of an independent investigation. The final sentence of a document posted on the NPL’s website for at least three weeks serves as a rationale for weeding: “The past is important, but we must not preserve it to the detriment of the present and the future.”
If a library, by definition, exists to preserve the past, that line should have served as a letter of resignation.
In eight other public libraries, I have taken counts. Volumes by authors such as Melville, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and even John Steinbeck have numbered in the two to six range. East and west of Steinbeck, pop culture authors Danielle Steel and Jacqueline Susann number as high as 80, and no lower than 40.
Meanwhile, we praise public libraries that display and encourage the circulation of books, mostly contemporary, now banned in schools in Florida and elsewhere. Glad they do it, but isn’t weeding just as much of a dumbing down?
Friends in Lowell, Northampton (where it’s called “deaccessioning”), and Wareham have noticed it. Another reports the weeding of classical music from the CD collection at the library in Amherst. Others report it from as far as Santa Rosa and Seattle. In the August 2023 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Return,” a short story set in New Jersey, describes weeding without using the word.
Defenders of the practice are quick to mention online access of interlibrary loans. So much for browsing, serendipity, and random discovery that have always been reasons to go to a library. Says one librarian, algorithms now show a book’s circulation. Books gathering dust are now tossed with no regard for who wrote them, or what significance they might hold in American history or literary tradition.
Melville’s Moby Dick may yet survive on shelves outside Newbury. But how many Americans know that his previous book, White-Jacket, was an exposé of the U.S. Navy that led to many reforms, including a ban on flogging? Or that Redburn, the one before that, offers a firsthand look at waves of immigrants boarding a ship in Liverpool and making the transatlantic passage to America?
Today, the logic — both practical and legal — of Melville’s analysis of flogging could strengthen any case for regulating automatic weapons. Likewise, his account of desperate immigrants could strengthen cases against the looming threat of mass deportations.
American libraries are now complicit in the erasure of history that an informed, educated public needs to confront issues of today. Among those books tossed are hardcovers well-worn a century ago for their historical record and insight. Today, their ragged covers must appear as eyesores to young librarians blind to their real value.
Librarians deserve credit for resisting calls for censorship, but this no-thought-required practice of determining what stays and what goes is itself a form of censorship, however unwitting. The irony here is jaw-dropping: American libraries are literally judging books by their covers.
Jack Garvey
Newbury resident
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