McNaughtons and the Pyramids

[darkelf105]

Today I pull the McNaughtons from the shelves. For those of you not in the know, these are the rented books that public libraries put in their collection. Many get sent back, a certain percentage is retained, and another percentage is trashed. What I feel bad about is as I am going through these books some of them will probably never see the light of day again. Like Ray Bradbury's book of essays. It has only had once CIRC the entire time it has been on our shelves and that was me. It will probably get sent back and then trashed. Stupid Nora Roberts on the other hand has about twelve damn copies of her 2005 novel here and we will probably retain two or three of them. Not to bash Nora Roberts or anything, but it makes me sad that we give so much shelf space to a woman who has written over 300 novels (dunno know about that just quoting Stephen King from Entertainment Weekly) and we retain a few copies of each. Now chances are about 70% of those 300 novels are junk, another 20% decent and the last 10% truly exemplar. Ray Bradbury has written about three bad novels in his entire career and yet considerably less shelf space and money has been allocated to this writer who is now arguably part of the American canon.  But we still make an effort to have his books on the shelf despite low CIRC counts. My point being, because I was listening to NPR about Ken Blackwell's plans on privatizing the freeway system (which means that other things traditionally government funded would go...read libraries here) is that your tax dollars are spent well. Yes for those of us who don't like Nora Roberts books, it is annoying that she gets so many and Lord Dunsany has only a handful of titles in the whole system, but Dunsany is still available. If a for profit company took over, not only would Bradbury get considerably less space, but I fear relatively unknow writers like Lord Dunsany will be relegated to academia...maybe, because he is also not part of the Western Canon despite some fine literary credentials.  Because a for profit company for a general reading audience, is not going to care about writers like Dunsany, Lafanu, and various others who aren't literary, but are still important to cultural tradition nevertheless.

Also, any opinions about the ethics of archeology and sending back art artifacts to their native countries?

Comments

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Heh. If the libraries become privatized, then it will be nothing but John Grisham, Nora Roberts, and Steven King books. Also the number of sappy religious books will go through the roof. What Would Buffy Do? A Spiritual Guide anyone? (Gee can you tell I was in Kmarts book section this morning?)

Again I say about the artwork: It's silly to have it all in one place, because Rip and the Nazi's would show up and destroy it. what happens when there is war/natural disaster and it all gets destroyed? Also not that big of an issue as a lot of things come from private collections. Lastly out of sight out of mind, if you take all the things from other cultures away and isolate them, then we, as a world culture, take a step backwards.