Here Today, Gone Tomorrow . . .

Something many people don’t know about libraries is that we are constantly ‘weeding’ our collections. There is finite space on our shelves and hundreds of books come out each month, many of which we need to buy to keep our collection current. So we weed old books that are no longer interesting, or that contain outdated information.

It’s easy to see that you can get rid of travel books that contain old prices and names of restaurants that are closed. Likewise with medical books whose information has been rendered incorrect by recent research.

One of the hardest calls to make when weeding are books that come under the subject headings ‘Presidential candidates,’ or ‘Presidential candidates – biography.’ Books about winners – Reagan, Clinton, Bush – and books about losers – Perot, Dukakis, Kerry – share equal space. During the election cycle, these are hot items; but interest in them is very short-lived. I mean, it was once a hot topic, but our copy of Unfit for Command, about whether John Kerry was a hero or a traitor in Vietnam, hasn’t been checked out since January 2005. Do we get rid of it now, or is it an important historical piece? Like Unfit for Command, many of these books are pitifully short on objectivity, so one surmises their accuracy is likewise suspect. This undermines their historical value, but what if someone is specifically researching the sort of smear campaigns that go on during American presidential campaigns?

Books on George W. Bush exemplify this trend. They range from the reverential A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House, written by Mr. Bush himself, to the accusatory Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush President. Again, these are both more campaign documents than history, but do we keep them for that purpose?

Probably no candidate has engendered more irrational fear than Hillary Clinton. With titles like Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton and Can She Be Stopped?, it seems that people regard her as some sort of liberal voodoo queen. Frankly, Hillary’s not my favorite candidate out of the gate, but this kind of silliness is laughable. And again, I don’t suppose – whatever the result of the election – that anyone will be reading these books after November 2008.

So they clog our shelves, a product of our inability to judge their continued relevance. Kind of the like the people they’re written about.