Words About Wilton: Gail Hoar – Getting answers on banned books

When our boys were little, our house was filled with children’s books, Recently, I took a course at Fitchburg State’s ALFA adult learning program on the topic of banned books. There I learned most of the well-loved books that lived for years on our children’s bookshelf were among those banned or selected for cautionary labels.

How could books entitled “Baseball Saved Us” be challenged? Or why were almost all of Maurice Sendak’s delightfully illustrated and humorously written tales of adventuresome and mischievous youngsters considered unfit for children’s consumption?

Two of our three sons were adopted and are of mixed ethnic heritages. In many communities in New Hampshire, children of color are few and far between. I wanted ours to have books that made them feel included and not outliers in the world they inhabited. I also wanted them to have a cultural history they could claim for themselves, learned from the stories they read. This was especially true since we had no idea if their biological parents would ever enter their future lives, although we hoped that might happen.

What saddened me when I scanned those long columns of banned and challenged books was that the majority of those listed dealt with growing up as a minority in our society. There are reasons given for this censorship, but I wonder if those who demand a book be removed from a shelf that may not appeal to them personally ever considered that very book may be the thing that helps another child find a place to fit in this world?

With these thoughts in mind, I wanted to ask people associated with our local libraries how they handle the issue of banned books. I also planned to ask our state librarian and our state education commissioner to weigh in on the topic. What I ran into were well-founded fears or policies and procedures at the local or state levels that made asking and receiving answers to my questions tricky, if not impossible.

Fortunately, I was able to find some answers from my ALFA classmates, many of whom were librarians or retired librarians still closely associated with their local institutions in Massachusetts. Although I’ve been hesitant to include information in this column not coming from those living or working in Wilton, I’m making an exception now since what I learned impacts everyone who has ever used the public or school libraries in Wilton and other Monadnock region towns. What I learned gave me hope for the future of libraries and the books they contain.

There was consensus from this group that many libraries, edging up to our southern New Hampshire border, find ways to reduce many book challenges, conflicts, threats and lawsuits by initiating policies reflecting the needs and reading habits of their individual communities. Needs, reading habits and reviews in professional publications were usually foremost in mind when librarians make either purchase choices or those hard decisions when books must be removed due to limited shelf space.

Most librarians were open to considering a few special requests. Others said they evaluated new nonfiction based on facts not speculation, and all agreed that inter-library loan was a wonderful resource-sharing tool. Then there also are all the digital tools now at patrons’ fingertips in local libraries.

They brought up how hard it is to not self-censor when you are charged with selecting titles for a library or bookstore, especially when it concerns a book you personally wouldn’t read. If it fills a need for your reading community, it should be added over a taste-based inclination not to do so.

One librarian with whom I spoke added, “If a book has value on a topic, you want to provide that to the community that needs it. Everyone should be able to see themselves through a lens of self-affirmation, often found in the books they read.”

According to my fellow students, there are two other policies in many libraries that seem to work for books that may be challenged. One is to consider shelving those books in an area more appropriate for the maturity level of the child reading the text or viewing the illustrations instead of relying on the shelving guides suggested for the book.  This may mean that a story written for a very young audience may be more-appropriately shelved in an area for a somewhat older reader.

A caveat was added to this view: “Care is needed to not overthink potential problems that may never arise.”

The second policy is that if this fails and a patron presents a challenge, there are several steps that both the staff and patron must take before any book is removed. First, all the library board members or trustees must read the book in question, as must the patron asking for its removal.

After this is done, the patron is then asked to point out the place or places in the book that raised their concerns and explain why they are an issue.  The concerns are then reviewed by the board or trustees and they make a final and binding decision.

The power of a book to help and heal should not be discounted. These are the kinds of issues librarians must deal with every time they make a curatorial decision to add or discard a book from their shelves.

One librarian’s final observation sums it up: “The best thing you can do for a book is to ban it because people will always seek out those to read.”