The Desk Set

When faced with this abundance and diversity of books, and the knowledge that I will read only a small portion of them in my lifetime, I find it hard to consider myself as “well-read” as people tend to assume librarians are, and it also challenges my own relatively narrow reading tastes and habits. At a bookstore, once I’ve found my book, I can generally forget about the rest as I go home to read. But while cataloging, I may find something new to read or add to my wish list, but I can’t ignore all of the other ones in the meantime, or they’d just keep piling up at my desk. In any case, my job is not to evaluate, but to classify and describe, these books, whether I would want to read them or not.

For all the careful work librarians do to methodically select and catalog new books, many readers (myself included) make seemingly impulsive book selections under the influence of a combination of superficial, subconscious, and social factors. Bookstores and publishers know this, and that’s why the books you see right when you walk in to a bookstore are likely to be the new releases and best-sellers with glitzy covers and A-list authors. Libraries, on the other hand, aren’t in the business of marketing books or profiting off of them in this fashion, but must consider demand and popularity alongside a range of other factors, such as budget, reviews, the strengths and weaknesses of the existing collection, likelihood that demand will last long after the initial release, institutional mission, and so on. With all these other pragmatic and idealistic concerns, it’s easy to think of “popular” as a dirty word: vulgar, commercialized, faddish, lowbrow, predictable–schlock that appeals to short attention spans and lowest common denominators, and smothers the time-tested classics and the under-appreciated works of international authors and independent presses which rarely make the best-seller lists. The opposite of “popular” is harder to define in this context, but can also be treated as a dirty word: highbrow, elitist, obsolete, inconsequential, or overwrought–works whose “special” status is less an indicator of quality than a marker of the educational and social privileging of a certain class of cultural producers and consumers that fails to represent the full spectrum of gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, ethnicity, and taste that makes our society what it is.

Readers (perhaps Librarians most of all) tend to take pride in their own individual discernment and taste when it comes to selecting the best books, but I daresay our reading habits are more subject to marketing tactics and social prejudices than we’d like to admit, and that may be why many of us cringed upon seeing Wuthering Heights dressed up like Twilight.But while libraries aren’t bookstores, they still must respond to demand, user behavior, and the fact that reading tastes are both deeply personal and deeply social. We like to define our individuality by the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and the books we read, but our sense of connection to others with similar tastes and expressions is still a powerful force.

While my own tastes cross the range of categories and genres both highbrow and lowbrow, I know I am guilty of casting some of these same superficial judgments on many of the books that come to me–formulaic “whodunit” mysteries and spy novels, sassy “chick lit,” pretentious “literary” novels, buzzword-laden punditry, and year-long stunt memoirs. If you’ve read (or cataloged) one, you’ve read (or cataloged) them all, it seems, but patrons still seem to read them faster than I can catalog them. This is not to blame the Acquisitions Department or eager readers; there will always be new books that I will never read, and a static library collection that never got anything new would be boring and would also leave me without a job.

In any case, it is not the job of librarians to impose their tastes (whatever they are) on everyone else, but to represent a range of tastes and ideas in serving a diverse public and preserving a diverse cultural record. If you come in searching for a book by Tom Clancy or Jackie Collins, you won’t just find it in a big display next to the entrance, but on the shelves alongside Joseph Conrad and Mary Higgins Clark and Willa Cather and Truman Capote and Albert Camus–and hundreds of other authors you have never even heard of but whose last names happen to begin with C. If you search in the catalog for “Man-woman relationships–New York (State)–New York–Fiction” you’ll get both The Age of Innocence and The Boyfriend From Hell, without anyone deciding on your behalf which is the better book.

These approaches encourage browsing and serendipity, without making particular books impossible to find, and it leaves less room for librarians to impose their own tastes or implied cultural hierarchies. Ultimately, these are just a few examples of why I feel that libraries can represent what “popular” means in a more positive sense: books that are accessible and available to everyone, that juxtapose a range of tastes and experiences and communities, and that empower readers to engage in the dialogue and discovery that leads to still more and better books.