Pale Horse, Pale Rider

A recent commentary on NPR by Alice McDermott has a lot of librarians up in arms. In it she tells the story of assigning Katherine Anne Porter's book Pale Horse, Pale Rider to one of her English classes. She was astounded when one of her students brought in a very old hardbound copy that had been withdrawn from a library. She went on to lament that this signified a devaluation of our literary heritage; her implication being that librarians cannot be trusted to protect what is most important in American letters if they are withdrawing books as important as this.

The problem is that this is just an example of a little knowledge being more dangerous than none at all. Sure, she observed a copy of an important work that had been withdrawn from a library. But is she at all aware of how libraries work? Of the fact that we withdraw hundreds, if not thousands of books every year? And that many of those, withdrawn because the copies are old and faded and dirty, are quickly replaced with fresh new copies, so that new generations of library patrons may enjoy reading them?

You don't work in a library for long without experiencing someone charging in with a volume they've picked up from your sale table, demanding to know why you got rid of it. Very often, the person is correct -- the book in question is one the library should keep in perpetuity. But very often, you are able to point out that the new copy is already ordered, if not already on the shelf.

Of course, no library can keep every book someone considers important. Usually, it's a budgetary matter. Right now, I could reel off the names of a dozen classics we should have, and no doubt there are many more. (Ironically, Webster Groves Public Library does not have a copy of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, though there are several available within the Consortium.) But we can't afford to buy all of these important books at once -- not while keeping up with the demand for current bestsellers. I dream of a time when we can.

This is the kind of thing we think about all the time. We know, we understand, we live for our literary heritage. We understand that books by the authors people beat down our doors for today -- James Patterson, Nora Roberts, David Baldacci -- are ephemeral in the extreme and will be discarded a decade from now. Books by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Tolstoy, Austen -- and yes, Porter -- will always need a place on our shelves.