by: Paul Terefenko
Ready for a good ol’ book bannin’? No, this isn’t about restarting the Huckleberry Finn n-word debate; it’s just time for the Toronto Public Library’s annual list of materials patrons wanted pulled from shelves.
The TPL’s 2010 tally totalled just nine items. “It’s not an unusual year,” says Vickery Bowles, the library’s director of collections management, adding that last year the number was seven.
What is a little unusual is what’s been targeted. There’s no Twain. No Vonnegut, Bradbury, Salinger or Lee. Even the Harry Potter series, with its heavy occult imagery, didn’t make the cut. Instead, the naughty nine were comprised of children’s and teen fiction, graphic novels, a Vanity Fair magazine article, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno DVD and a book on being a Chartered Financial Analyst.
A CFA exam book? Where’s the battle there? Give the public The Diviners or The Handmaid’s Tale to defend. Now there’s a fight.
“[Challenges] tend to consist of books that are not classics,” explains Franklin Carter, a researcher and editor for the Book and Periodical Council of Canada (BPC). “If someone questions a classic, the news media will go to press with it for days.”
But, by taking on Swans in the Mist, a piece of teen lit one patron said contained “sadistic scenes” and “might give teens violent ideas,” you probably won’t get front page headlines.
People will not mass in the streets to defend The Waiting Dog, a picture book aimed at seven-year-olds with “obscene content and language,” that tells the tale of a dog fantasizing about eating a mailman (but doesn’t act on animal urges and greets him happily).
For the record, both Swans in the Mist and The Waiting Dog were retained in their respective collections.
Tintin in the Congo, however, did get moved to the adult graphic book collection from the children’s collection, after it was deemed kids wouldn’t be able to place racist and colonial views in the context for which it was penned.
To be clear, the Toronto Public Library doesn’t take reconsideration requests lightly.
“This process is important to us,” Bowles explains. “It is respectful. People see we’ve taken requests very seriously. We look at reviews, other library holdings, read the materials and then consider all the information in context.”
And that’s just what happens after concerned folks are given the library’s material selection policy and asked if they still want to take complaints to another level.
The turnaround time for the committee of librarians is 12 weeks, and at the end of it, graphic novels like Tintin do occasionally get moved.
This year, Tintin was the only reclassified item. War Stories Volume 1, a collection of four fictional Second World War illustrated stories by all-star comic book artists including Dave Gibbons and David Lloyd, didn’t budge. Nor did The New Adventures of Jesus Christ: The Second Coming, a compilation of Frank Stack’s ’60s and ’70s critique of American culture.
Bruno, which takes on the hyper-sensitive and homophobic, was also — fittingly — retained in the adult collection.
In fact, the only thing that was rejected from the collection was the CFA book.
CFA: 100 Success Secrets — 100 Most Asked Questions was deemed to be “unreliable,” “misleading” and filled with “numerous grammatical and typographical mistakes.” The self-published tome just wasn’t useful to CFA exam students, according to the library’s findings.
“Sometimes we make an error,” Bowles admits. “That was one book we shouldn’t have acquired,” she says, adding that with the increase in self-published books, having a few mistakes squeeze through 850,000 annual acquisitions is understandable and highlights the importance of the review process.
After all, it’s about getting everyone’s point of view in. “Intellectual freedom is an important principle in our public library system,” Bowles says.
The release of challenged items also leads nicely into Freedom to Read Week (Feb. 20-26).
“The twin purpose of Freedom to Read Week is to make people aware that there are censorship challenges, but also to get them to appreciate they have this great and glorious freedom to read,” says Carter of the Week designated by the BPC’s Freedom of Expression Committee.
By way of national context, the TPL’s handful of contested items is eclipsed by the 139 challenges across Canada in 2009 (the most recent year for which stats are available).
Among those: Gossip Girl novels, Now magazine, Adbusters, The Anal Sex Position Guide, The Story of Seabiscuit (with Shirley Temple), Hooking Up with Tila Tequila and The Krakow Ghetto and the Plaszow Camp Remembered. It’s a wide net, as you can gather.
While they may not make headlines, these challenges are present in Canada.
“The censorship issue doesn’t go away,” says Carter, acknowledging that we don’t face anything close to that of, say, North Korea. “But there are people and organizations in this society that believe the most effective way to deal with troublesome ideas, images or information is simply to ban it.”
from: Natonal Post
No comments:
Post a Comment