Letter: Whose banning books at the library?

There is a peculiar trend in our local libraries: Half-empty shelves in the children’s non-fiction section. Several months ago I witnessed a library employee in the main branch pulling a massive amount of books from the shelves of this section and adding them to piles of hundreds of books on the children’s librarian’s desk. The predictable result came a month later when I could not locate middle school level material for Christopher Columbus, James Madison or Thomas Jefferson. In fact, the adult section had one book on Columbus, the Pulitzer prize 1943 Admiral of the Ocean Seas, on a shelf containing six Hillary Clinton biographies. An online search yielded no better results, there were a few picture books and adult “decolonization” books: It was almost as if Columbus is being erased or memory holed from our library system.

Equally, disturbing was some of the replacement books. In the children’s nonfiction section there were two copies of Becoming for Young Readers, the Michelle Obama autobiography. This is an interesting choice over Columbus or Jefferson, but at least the former first lady is a historical figure. Many of the new books in this section are people (mostly women of color) of whom no one has heard and have made no historical or cultural impact on our society. One such book is This is our Rainbow: 16 Stories of Her, Him, and Us. This supposed inspirational book is about people whose achievements are unimpressive and includes child queer romance.

Meanwhile books such as Soujourner Truth: In Her Own Words and the highly popular series Childhood of Young Americans are being discarded. I encourage the reader to search the Tillabook online catalogue for biographies with the refinements of library, book, and juvenile to see the titles and their availability in all branches. Visit your local branch, as well. This isn’t a mere attempt to “Queer the Catalogue,” as the current American Library Association president suggested in her paper 30 years ago, but a book ban against great Americans of all color and sex by a lone employee of the county

April Bailey

Neskowin, Oregon