The Library World Volume 62 Issue 3

HAS the librarian responsibility for what is in the books he provides for the use of readers; if so, docs he, indeed can he, recognize it or do anything useful about it? We do not mean, as the most important thing, his fear, reasonable or otherwise, of books which have too much sexuality. It is a major problem upon which no authoritative statement for our guidance has ever been made except perhaps the police inhibitions and the Roman Catholic indexes in the subject just mentioned. That we can dispose of in the favourite saying of Stanley Jast “The Bovril of today is the Mellin's Food of tomorrow”, and refer to the general shift of public opinion towards toleration, or a more easy regard for sex in literature. To deny sex is to deny life. The problem is one that does not affect any but public adult libraries, where the reader need not read any book which offends his code but is not privileged to interfere with the choice of others who alone can be responsible for their own reading. Thus the argument goes, but public men are concerned for the unlettered reader who chooses a book in innocence. These can cause much trouble. One of the annual reports before us puts another difficult angle of the question: the readers who invariably demand these books at the public expense and question the librarian's assumption that he can refuse to purchase them. The schoolgirl is also a great concern to many: she is likely to know as much, if she is damaged by any book, as does her gratuitous protector. It would have been unthinkable twenty years ago for a national newspaper to publish the substance of a recent teacher's assertion that after an address on the facts of life to a form of senior girls, one of the girls told her it was interesting but had come too late: all the girls in her form had experienced sex and “would be thought odd if they had not.” This seems an extreme case but it has a definite warning that the trouble does not originate in the library.