I’m just a substitute librarian, and I don’t work very much, but when you work in a public library you get some interesting people asking interesting questions.
I’ve helped a perfectly ordinary young man find out how to enlist in the French Foreign Legion.
I’ve listened politely as one of our local nutty folks has told me about her close relationship with Bryan Adams (she’s his songwriter), and I’ve flinched as she’s handed me loose change with a live maggot along for the ride.
But today I got a new one. I just helped a guy request a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion through InterLibrary Loan.
I feel like I’ve had an archetypal experience or something; in library school, you always discuss the Protocols as an example of a controversial book that libraries ought to have because of its value to historical research and our committment to free speech and allowing space to all viewpoints. Now all I need is a request for Holocaust denial literature, and my librarian life will be complete…
Always weird helping someone with sources you find objectionable. I’ve helped so many students research papers that are anti gay marriage/anti gay adoption that I pretty much know the bibliography of books and articles by heart. I help them as I would any other patron and I’ve yet to express objections of course, but it is always a strange feeling. (At least he didn’t request a map of D.C. and a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook or you’d have to decide whether to contact Homeland Security .)
Just because someone checks out a book doesn’t mean they agree with its contents. I have whole shelves of books I don’t agree with, simply for the purpose of refining my positions against some views. Know thine enemy and all that.
Re: the patron who wants to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, aren’t some of you kind of jumping to conclusions here? Not everyone who reads *Mein Kampf * is a Nazi, and not everyone who reads a Jack Chick publication is a rabid fundamentalist.
Oh, I don’t think he was seriously interested in reading the book in order to learn how to be a better anti-Semite. He was an aged hippie guy, and I got the distinct impression that he just enjoys reading controversial books, the more objectionable the better, so he can say he’s read them. He probably owns The anarchist’s cookbook, no need to borrow that one. (At least, my college boyfriend had it, so I don’t think it’s hard to find.) He happily told me about how he had bought some “hot” titles in order to donate them to the library a few years back.
Still, it was something of a once-in-a-lifetime experience–hardly anyone actually tries to read the Protocols. And though it was kind of surreal, it wasn’t as bad as the time this poor woman asked me to find research that would convince her boyfriend that polyamory is a bad idea. I mean, if you have to come up with sociology studies to convince a guy, rather than saying “you know, I’m just not comfortable with that idea,” then it’s probably a good idea to run away! But you can’t tell your library patron that honey, it’s time to find a new boyfriend and dump this jerk.
Lol - I have to share that as a high schooler who worked in the library when I attended an ultra-conservative christian boarding school, my most bizarre library moments involve watching the librarian use a black magic marker to extend hemlines or cover cleavage that she felt was inappropriate in certain periodical ads. Don’t even get me started on what she did to those poor National Geographics.
The lady that checked the book out to me asked if it was for a class. The smart thing would have been to say yes. Instead, I said no, it was for fun and she gave me a look like this: :eek:
I know it’s silly, but I got the distinct impression they thought I had anti-Muslim leanings. All over a history book!
I think she thought the black marker was more believable. She took painstaking care to copy the neckline - just extend it further, etc. It was an obsession.
.)