Week 27: Does this spark joy?
weeks late to the weeding libraries discourse, with absolutely no new takes
Note: I wrote this two? three? weeks ago, so humor me and imagine it’s early August, I’m still living in New Jersey, and Twitter is, as ever, aflame. To be fair, though, no one reads this newsletter to stay up-to-the-second on library discourse (if you’re seeking that, check out Colleen Theisen’s digest Library News This Week). I am the paper boy, arriving on foot to the outskirts of the countryside village with three-week old city news. Good to see you all again.
Anyways, at the behest of my parents, I took a week-long break from the terrible Ts of the internet—Twitter, TikTok, and The News—and I returned to the bird site Tuesday, August something, to find all the librarians yelling that “It’s okay to throw out books!!!!!” which felt a little bit like:
Basically, someone posted a photo with a bunch of moldy copies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in a giant dumpster and lamented that the local librarians didn’t do a better job of trying to locate those books to a new home. Claire Sewell already wrote an excellent Medium post about all of the steps librarians go through to weed collections and why those books don’t go to ~other~ places like prison, school, or shelter libraries (the presumptuousness and classism of which is suffocating). So I recommend reading Sewell’s piece and also Beth DeBold’s tweets here:
“There is a huge difference between the survival of a text, and the survival of a single paper copy of a text.” What an excellent articulation of the issue at hand. This recalls to me the non-issue of Dr. Seuss inflation oh so many months ago: we know where these texts are! They are okay. If, however, anyone would like to figure out where the first edition of The New England Primer is (printed 1687? 1690?), I’m sure a lot of people would be thrilled. The New England Primer was read so voraciously and so widely that the earliest edition we have of it is from 1727. Nearly 40 years of reissues to that first extant copy. Not a single one survives. But tell me more about how Huxley is under threat from disinterested school children and pipe leaks.
It bemuses me that libraries continuously updating their collections rankles so many people who then misguidedly bemoan the loss of text (which again, is not what’s happening here), and then those same people pay little mind to how private purchases of text are often far more tenuous and ephemeral than circulating material at their local library. In simpler terms, I wonder where gather the crusaders against forced obsolescence of e-reader devices or the zealots combatting default rentals instead of ownership of digital texts. You and I and our local libraries do not own the copies of texts we “purchase” for digital use, we merely rent them. They can be taken away or weeded out of a for-profit bookstore far more easily and without recourse than the weeding at public libraries. Sure, material copies are vulnerable to flood and fire, but your Kindle is vulnerable to Amazon. I just moved into a basement apartment, so I’ve thrown my lot in with the water.
housekeeping and birdseeking
housekeeping
This is an issue I wrote two weeks ago and then forgot to send because I drove across the country. Thanks for being patient! A few more issues will come barreling into your inbox this weekend to get us all caught up.
bird
mourning the loss of Barry the Barred Owl, a pandemic fixture of Central Park.
More later.