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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhu's Librarian" data-source="post: 1134184" data-attributes="member: 11064">Ok, I'm here. Now the discussion can begin... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Actually, I don't know if I can really say more than has already been said by others. I'm against the challenging/banning of books, for many reasons. I can however, tell a few stories about situations I've been in where books have been challenged. Growing up, my mother was a school teacher, and always encouraged me to read, as long as the books were what she considered suitable and I could reasonably understand them. Her definition of suitable was very broad, and rarely did I have anything taken from me. I can't say the same for my third grade teacher, who took my copy of The Hobbit away from me because "It's too long for an 8 year old to be reading." I had just been given the book as a gift, and Mom was furious at the teacher. She went into school the next morning and took her to task for that, and I'll never forget it. She may not have liked that I was reading Stephen King in middle school, but Mom kept buying them for me. I think I turned out all right, except for this desire to accumulate as many books as possible... In my professional life, I have worked as a bookstore manager, an assistant editor for a major publisher, and now in a library. In each of these jobs, I've run across people who had problems with books. At the bookstore, I once had a mother march her 17 or 18 year old son back into the store to return Interview with a Vampire, then yelled at me for selling it to him. She kept it up until we had to call security to remove her from the store. We also had an elderly woman who used to gather book sup from around the store that she objected to, drop them at the counter and tell me to send them back because they were corrupting society with sex and murder. Then she would buy 3 or 4 Harlequin romance novels and leave. At HarperCollins Publishers, somehow people would get our office number, and call to tell us we were responsible for corrupting young minds or that we had no right to publish some of the books we did. One time, I received a package in the mail containing a copy of The Crow: The Lazarus Heart which we had published a couple months earlier. The book had been torn to pieces, and the long letter that came with it included a review of the story, including long quotes from the book that were objectionable, and very vivid descriptions of why they were wrong to have been in the book. After several pages of this, the letter writer asked for a refund because the bookstore she purchased it from wouldn't give her money back because she had "torn the filthy book to pieces." Currently, at the library, we have a faculty member who has been going through the libraries collections and demanding that books be removed for various reasons. Some of the reasons include: obscene, not good examples of literature, bad words, not being true stories (ie. it's fiction), and "I don't like it." So we take the books from him, give them to the circulation manager, and they get reshelved. Are any of these cases going to lead to something big? No, probably not, but book challenges start somewhere. As with so many things these days, small minded people can be very persistant, and if given the wrong (or right) venue to be heard, they can cause problems. In the meantime, I know where I stand on the issue, and will be fighting if necessary to keep information free for those who desire it.</blockquote>

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