According to The Washington Post, public libraries are tossing little-read classics so that they can make more room on their shelves for popular best-sellers. I think this is a good thing. Public libraries exist so that people can read books for free. Their purpose is not to force-feed the public a canon of Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, and Woolf.
Of course, I still wish more people read To the Lighthouse. But shelf-space is a scarce resource, and a book that isn't being read is just a haven for dust. Given that there is no easy way to distinguish between novels that are "educational" (i.e., "The Classics") and novels that are merely "entertaining" (Grisham, Clancy, Crichton, et. al), I think libraries should rely on popular demand when culling their collection. I'm more likely to trust the wisdom of crowds than the wisdom of literary critics.
When I was researching my book, I relied on my local library for the collected works of Gertrude Stein. (I didn't expect to re-read The Making of Americans for fun at some later point in my life.) I always enjoyed checking the inside flap for past due dates: it was the rare Stein work that had been checked out more than once in the last twenty years. (The exception was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was actually quite popular.) And while I certainly appreciated the library's investment in the modernist classics, I'm not sure Gertrude Stein was the best way to allocate shelf space. We are much better off reading Gertrude Stein here.
Comments (4)
In addition, you can always get the classics on Inter Library Loan, buy inexpensive paperback copies, or download the public domain works from Project Gutenberg.
Posted by: writerdddd | January 5, 2007 11:53 AM