John Miller writes an interesting article in Opinion Journal. It has to do with the fact that a library in Virginia is choosing to discard classic books of literature (such as Hemingway) because no one has checked the books out in two years. And instead stocking shelves with presumably more contemporary books that people presumably will check out more than every two years.
What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?
If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries at all? There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms.
It is a good question. But he goes further, with a rather extended kosmic kwote:
The bottom line is that it has never been easier or cheaper to read a book, and the costs of reading probably will do nothing but drop further.
If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson DeMille's newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart.
Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a good dictionary as the model. Such a dictionary doesn't merely describe the words of a language--it provides proper spelling, pronunciation and usage. New words come in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a foundation of linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends.
The particulars of this task will fall upon the shoulders of individual librarians, who should welcome the opportunity to discriminate between the good and the bad, the timeless and the ephemeral, as librarians traditionally have done. They ought to regard themselves as not just experts in the arcane ways of the Dewey Decimal System, but as teachers, advisers and guardians of an intellectual inheritance.
In other words, librarians are our "cultural grammarians" and what they shelf, the great books, are our "cultural grammar". That seems exactly right, to me. Of course, that scenario requires people being educated in that grammar, in the first place, through study of the Humanities.
