A very good point, and actually, I had never previously thought of how libraries start off their book collections and decide which new books to buy every year. I assume it’s a combination of patron requests and best-seller lists or something. Though for children and young-adult literature, it also appears that they do a lot of their buying based on the yearly awards/medals (Newbery, Caldecott, etc).

I would totally go to a library whose collection consisted only of Nobel prize winners. So wonderfully pretentious!

A library is a certain size, and books are a certain size. Books continue to be introduced. Thus, the library must do a combination of (a) expand, (b) not obtain every new book, and/or (c) remove certain books from the collection. I think no one is proposing that only (a) is acceptable. Both (b) and (c) will require someone to exclude books from the library.

So, who gets to decide? If you say, ‘patrons’, you get what you are calling ‘censorship’. If you say, ‘the librarians’, then that’s just a government committee dictating their taste in literature, which many wouldn’t like either. If you were to select things randomly, then everyone would presumably be equally unhappy with the result.

What I see here is a system that limits library patron’s access to information no matter how you arrange it. The system’s limitations will disproportionally affect minors and those of lower income, but this is not the only nor the worst example of systematic discrimination against these groups in our society.

As an add-on, I object to the watering-down of terms like ‘censorship’. But I recognize that I’m a prescriptive fuddy-duddy, and that in the absence of an environment where distribution or possession of materials is punished, people will start to apply ‘censorship’ to the actions of public libraries and blog owners.

True, but neither should a library be obliged to remove books that it already has on the shelves because one patron complains that the book promotes an “anti-establishment view,” for instance. (And that was a poetry anthology!)

Of course, it’s not; one example being customs and their obscenity confiscations.

Also, I love the art deco illustration on A Farewell to Arms.

Censoring I’ve performed:
Deleted various comments on my blog, which were made by spam bots.
I’ve given the thumbs-down on social news sites like digg and reddit, which can eventually cause the comment to go invisible, which effectively censures the comment.
I was recently forced to throw a few of my old study guides into the recycling pile as no one wanted to take them off our hands. I was guilt ridden as it felt like I was participating in a book burning.