Thread by @book_historia

The “o no a library weeded their collection! :’( what is this world coming to?” post has a similar vibe as that cop publicity stunt Little Free Library thing a few months ago. Both are manufactured emotional manipulation based on the IDEA of books rather than the REALITY of books

With the cop LFL incident, the idea of people taking books to sell was treated as abhorrent, immoral. The practice of weeding is seen in the same way. Neither view considers the people actually DOING the thing (taking books, weeding)

If people were desperate enough to raid a LFL to get a couple bucks from shitty used paperbacks, they were probably in a tight spot (if they sold them at all!! That’s just what the cops speculated happened!! Maybe they just wanted books!!)

If the library threw away old, out-of-date, poor condition books, that’s A GOOD THING. If you walked into your local library and grabbed a book and it was falling apart and full of food stains, I don’t think you would feel great about that library

But it also may be an indicator of a larger issue within the field: labor. What if those books WEREN’T gross? Why didn’t the librarians just give them away/have a book sale/keep them?

Tell me, concern troller, how do you think things happen in libraries? Do the books just leap off the shelves into the hands of users? If there were to be a book sale, would they price, sort, and advertise themselves, and run the cash register?

Do they seek out a school to home themselves in? (Never mind the labor and budget shortages in education, holy shit. You think a school librarian is going to have the time to process a bunch of “well-loved” books of different genres that a library dumps on them?)

Spoiler: no, the books don’t take care of themselves. People take care of the books, and there are often not enough people to do that. If you’re upset about libraries throwing away disintegrating fiction, maybe consider HOW HARD it would be to fix that book

If you’re upset that the library didn’t sell/give away the books, consider how much labor goes into those things. Librarians are stretched thin due to budget cuts, and you think it would be a valuable use of time to organize a sale that would make them MAYBE a couple hundo?

This all cycles back too to the wack-ass idea that special collections have a fire suppression system that sucks all the air out of the stacks, and librarians are willing to suffocate to save their collections. NOPE

There’s a certain kind of concern troll who values the idea of books over the reality of people. Librarians should be willing to work themselves to death for the noble cause of Books. What does that cause consist of? “Well, I don’t know, just HAVING them I guess.”

Librarianship is NOT just ✨Reading✨ all day surrounded by 📖books📖 #aesthetic, it’s a JOB. It’s a LIVELIHOOD. See this article for more on that: inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocationa…

Librarians need to make decisions not just for individual patrons, but for the survival of their organization as a whole. Managers need to decide where best to delegate the labor and funds they have access to in order to get the most out of them

Sometimes that means making hard choices. It’s not fun to throw out a book, but for reasons ranging from condition to market desirability to cost of labor, sometimes you just GOTTA

The inability of concern trolls to reconcile the Sacred Ideal of the Book with the people that provide access to them is a pity.

Also, nobody is throwing away the Gutenberg Bible, so chill

And the tweet that started this whole thread:

https://twitter.com/1mikaelams/status/1424768200370229252

Hahaha, she's doubling down

https://twitter.com/1mikaelams/status/1425073268982169623?s=20

Man, as much as I’m enjoying the engagement with this thread, I think I’m going to have to turn off notifications about it… they’ve made the app pretty unusable 😂 If you want to talk about all this more, @ me! I’m always looking for an excuse to talk about books 📚