Suburban LA County (SB County) Pulls Manga Text from Libraries

[PatGund]

Technically, it's San Bernardino County that pulled this book from the shelves....

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/8510.html

"Bill Postmus, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of suburban San Bernadino County, California, has ordered the county's libraries to remove the scholarly text Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics from circulation. He proudly announced the move, calling the book "obscene comics," on the county's Website, saying, "That book is absolutely inappropriate for a public library and as soon as I was made aware of it yesterday, I ordered it to be removed immediately."

The flap started in Victorville, after a 16-year-old checked the book out of the adult section of the library. The teen's mother "was horrified," according to a story in the local Desert Dispatch, and wrote a letter to the library asking that the book be removed.

County Library Collection Development Coordinator Nannette Bricker-Barrett, in a proud moment for free speech, was quoted by the newspaper as noting that it was the parent's responsibility to determine what a minor checked out of the adult section. "It is the parents' responsibility since the library does not act as a parent. It is the library's responsibility to offer a broad spectrum of materials, not to exclude materials....Library policy affirms the American Library Association's Library Bill of rights, Freedom to Read, and Freedom to View statements." The county-wide system had 13 copies of the book in its collection."

PDF with the press release is here:

http://www.co.san-bernardino.ca.us/postmus/PressReleases/POSTMUSORDERSOBSCENEBOOKREMOVEDFROMLIBRARY.pdf

And is is Supervisor Bill Postmus?? From his offical bio at http://www.co.san-bernardino.ca.us/postmus/bio.htm :

"Supervisor Postmus is Chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Party."

Which should come as no surprise to anyone here.......

[WinkyDink]

1. Libraries pick, choose, and sell off books all the time.

It's not as if they carry every "scholarly" tome, now, is it?

[DBoon]

2. It's one thing not to buy something

another to pull something you've already bought off the shelf

[PatGund]

3. In this case.....

The library was *ordered* to remove all copies of this book in their system.

And the supervisor flat out lied about what was in it. Obviously he never read the book in question....

[Warpy]

4. Oh ferkrissakes. What happened to "the stacks?"

That was a separate area in most libraries when I was growing up, a sop to the pious, where all sorts of "questionable" books were kept away from good Baptists so they wouldn't have an opportunity to purse their lips and wrinkle their long blue noses as they searched for Gothic novels and how to fix their cars.

I was a precocious brat who discovered the stacks when I was about 13 or 14. One thing my mother did for me was never limit my reading, and she gave the library permission to admit me to them.

It's where I found wonderful scatalogical stuff like Twain's "1601" and the full Henry Miller collection.

I'm surprised libraries don't still do this.

[boobooday]

7. This wasn't the library choosing

This was one mother demanding that a book be pulled. That's different. The book was already there, who is she to decide that nobody else can see it?

[AnnieBW]

5. Geeze,

What was in that book, hentai?

[Noxmtbnk]

8. the objection...

"The 2004 trade paperback, written by Paul Gravett and published by Harper Design, is a history of Japanese comics, and includes, in several chapters, discussion of adult comics that depict sex and violence. The violence was apparently not an issue, nor was the fact that the reproductions of panels that feature sexual situations were, as far as we could tell, all R-rated and treated in a serious, scholarly way. Postmus' statement and the local newspaper coverage made much of the fact that the book contains "sex with animals," but we couldn't find it; we must not have looked as hard."

[jayfish]

6. psssst....

DON'T LET 16-YEAR OLDS CHECK OUT BOOKS FROM THE ADULT SECTION! Why am I constantly giving up little bits and pieces of my rights, in the interest of protecting the children, because some people can't do their f'ing job?

Jay

[salin]

9. Read too quickly - thought it was a copy of the Magna Carta

that was being pulled - you know the historic document that first codified the concept of a contract between a govt and the citizenry. Guess my growing cynicism, skepticism and overly quick read of headlines is showing.