Libraries should be ladders, not lounges
The Gist: The pathetic public library, and what it could be instead
I was searching my local public library’s website to see if it had a copy of Cultural Amnesia, a collection of essays by the Australian critic Clive James with the theme of moral clarity in the face of totalitarianism and cultural decay.
I thought it was promising when the search function completed the title before I finished typing - but the library didn’t have it. Instead, the website sorted options by relevance and suggested, did I mean…
Wyoming Wildcat? “The Wyoming rancher was only looking for the promised reward when he set off to track down the mysterious Molly Ivins, missing some eighteen years. But after a nasty fall robbed him of his memory, things got a lot more complicated. Tragically orphaned at seven, Molly Ivins fell into the caring hands of a Cheyenne medicine man and came to be known as Moon Hawk. Yet when a handsome white man with amnesia burst into her life, she had to decide between newfound love and loyalty to her tribe.”
Uncovering the Merchant’s Secret? “A man with no past may hold the key to a young widow's future in this dramatic medieval romance. Shipwrecked merchant Jack Langdon is lucky to be alive. When he wakes with no memory on the shore of a French village, he steals a kiss from a beautiful stranger…”
Lord Crayle’s Secret World? (65 copies available! More copies than the book has ratings on Goodreads) “A desperate highwaywoman's attempt to rob a dashing spymaster leads to an enticing arrangement in this thrilling Regency romance.” It’s not even clear that this plot involves amnesia, much less culture.
Betrothed to the Enemy Viking? “Left for dead by a mysterious attacker, Viking warlord Kal Randrson comes around with a deep head wound and a hazy memory, yet he instantly recognizes his rescuer—captivating Lady Cynehild”
The Dissolute Duke? “With a name synonymous with sin and debauchery so shocking it is spoken of only in whispers, Taylen Ellesmere, Duke of Alderworth, is more surprised than anyone when he finds himself forced to marry!”
No, I did not mean any of those. But some portion of my tax dollars went to ensuring they were available to me. I wish I was joking.
Figure 1. Perhaps I ought to write this series, previewed in previous correspondence, to sell to the nation’s eager librarians. It can return in search results when people look for Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (set in a Swiss sanatorium).
There was a time when public libraries were designed to be engines of uplift, democratizing knowledge, especially technical knowledge, for anyone who cared to self-improve. The capitalist hall of famer Andrew Carnegie donated money to found thousands of libraries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and a remarkable effect was observed: “Patenting in recipient towns increased by 7-11 percent in the 20 years following library construction.” ChatGPT estimates that “shelf composition in many late‑19th‑century public libraries was roughly three‑quarters non‑fiction” but paternalistic librarians of the 1890s were concerned that patrons still preferred fiction, so they insisted that patrons could only check out a second book if it was nonfiction, which substantially increased the circulation of the latter and, by their own accounting, “materially improved the character of reading.”1
I’ve encountered a number of famous Americans who self-educated by working their way through a library. Harlow Shapley, the astronomer who wound up being the first to define the scope of the Milky Way, graduated from elementary school and became a teenage reporter, working his way through a Carnegie library in his spare time before zipping through a high school equivalency (and going on to lead Harvard’s observatory for 30 years). David McCullough reports that Harry Truman as a boy would spend “long afternoons in the town library” which “contained perhaps two thousand volumes” which he “vowed to read all of them, encyclopedias included” and “claimed to have succeeded,” falling in love with history. The science fiction author Ray Bradbury insisted “I’ve never been to college…The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”2 According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Samuel Johnson is “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”; he advised: “I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains the instruction; which is so much the more likely to come, from the inclination with which he takes up the study.” The trouble is the accumulation of unfit books. Truman did not read the Dissolute Duke.
At some point in the later twentieth century, libraries shifted to embracing entertainment, first more and more popular fiction (today, over 2/3 of library budgets for purchasing books go to fiction). In the age of streaming, my local library has available to check out a stock of music CDs (do Zoomers even know what these are?), movie DVDs (new at the library is the “erotic thriller” Babygirl), and even wholesome video games like Grand Theft Auto and Borderlands 3, which the library website promises “The original shooter-looter returns with Borderlands 3, packing gazillions more guns and an all-new mayhem-fueled adventure!” No doubt libraries are chasing circulation statistics to justify budgets, but one wonders why, among the 18 million copies of Borderlands 3 that have apparently been sold, some need to be bought by taxpayer libraries. The typical lefty argument for public broadcasting is that it provides a product that the market won’t, but this is the equivalent of PBS re-airing Game of Thrones (naturally, my local library offers the books, the DVDs, graphic novel versions, and derivative works for George R.R. Martin’s series)
Figure 2. “What do you mean you have no records?? How else am I supposed to listen to Straight Outta Compton??”
And while my local library offers, among its featured children’s nonfiction in 2025, multiple guides to Minecraft and biographies of contemporary sports stars, it also engages in obvious progressive paternalism, offering - again, among its featured children’s nonfiction: Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby (and Antiracist Kitchen); “We Miss You, George Floyd”; “Queer Mythology”; a “climate movement anthem”; a critical take on Joe McCarthy; biographies of Sonia Sotomayor, Kamala Harris, the ecofeminist Bella Abzug, and (multiple) Shirley Chisholm; as well as a multi-volume series on the erasure of indigenous peoples in the 20th century - but not, despite my effort to give them for free, any Tuttle Twins, the best-selling series that teaches kids about liberty, nor anything I’d characterize as conservative or libertarian - except the excellent Growing up Under a Red Flag, about a Chinese girl whose father is taken away during the Cultural Revolution and a biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, who ranks relatively low in the hall of fame of justices on the right. Bear in mind that the last Democrat nominee for President to win my county (and with only a plurality) was in 1992, and that my county is only represented by Republicans in the 2/3 Republican Tennessee legislature, and has an overwhelmingly Republican commission as well as a Republican mayor. But “librarians who donate to Democrats outnumber those who give to Republicans roughly 9 to 1”3
Further, the featured children’s nonfiction includes, as just a sample, the Spider Lady (about a female arachnologist), Cactus Queen (about a female cactologist), Comet Chaser (about the genuinely underappreciated astronomer Caroline Herschel), and individual books about a female conservationist, a female astronaut, a female vaccine doctor, America’s first black female doctor, and multiple on black female computers at NASA. I am the new father of a daughter and I appreciate the opportunity to hold up female heroes - but I am also the father of two sons - and men have, as I understand it, contributed at least a little to science. In this library’s featured children’s nonfiction section, in total, we get a book on Einstein, another on the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, one on Frederick Banting (the creator of insulin), and a book about the dinosaur bone wars. Were there, perchance, any white male astronauts? Does Tony Hawk qualify as a physicist? Personally, I, as an American white man, freely admire Margaret Thatcher and Lee Kuan Yew as two of the greatest political leaders of all time, far better than the vast majority of white men (some of whom are among the very worst). I have no trouble identifying with them even if they don’t share all aspects of my identity - the ideas and accomplishments matter. People obviously divide over politics - but we should be highlighting for children not just somewhat random members of professions who match diversity goals but the actually most accomplished innovators in history, and necessarily more of the latter.
Part of this, obviously, is a publisher problem. I’ve been working my way through Charles Murray’s excellent survey of Human Accomplishment, in which he rank-orders the most significant contributors to technology, physics, chemistry, earth sciences, art, etc. and have been acquiring any children’s books that profile the people at the top (with only so much success). But, of course, libraries are significant sources of demand for these potential books, and if they were uniformly committed to showing children how our world came to be shaped and known, we’d get a lot more. Instead, progressive library journals recommend progressive books from progressive publishers to progressive librarians.
Incidentally, there were no nonfiction books that detail how a car actually works and how it can be fixed, or how a house is built or plumbed, or any number of other technical points that could actually foster an interest in doing things; nor were there obvious virtue books about say, saving money or delayed gratification. To the degree marriage, one of the most important aspects of the human experience, is the theme of a book, it is inevitably between two members of the same sex - which constitute about 1% of marriages in the United States, according to GPT.
And let’s not forget that, when they’re not hosting drag queen story hour for children, many libraries have become de facto homeless shelters, pornography access points, and bathroom facilities while employing social workers on site. Libraries have also retired overdue charges as a matter of equity, never mind the increased burden on the taxpayer. A library in a 60% Republican county that stocks 90% (or even 51%) progressive political content fails a basic democratic test, to the degree taxpayers care about reflecting the intellectual diversity of the tax base. And yes, it’s nice that my library has (one book from) Milton Friedman, (another one from) Friedrich Hayek, (and one from) Whittaker Chambers, but they’re overwhelmed by the alternative (not to mention the zero books by Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, etc.) But suggest that perhaps these libraries might have too much liberal, too much shlock, and suddenly you’re a censor.
Figure 3. Whenever you see a banned book display, somehow they fail to include the Bible (to this day banned or heavily censored for hundreds of millions of people), or Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally (a scholarly treatise delisted on Amazon as “hate speech”), or a collection of drawings of Muhammad, or any of the endless conservative titles that liberals just refuse to stock.
We’ve come a long way from providing a center for the aspirational to climb the social ladder, to discover new universes, to invent new great improvements to life, to fall in love with history before making it. The point of a public library, to the degree we have them, should be to empower self-motivated strivers with free access to the best that has been thought and said, especially in technical fields that cleanly present the most direct path to rising in and contributing to society. To the degree they contain books that transmit values, conservative taxpayers should see their values reflected, rather than overwhelmingly rejected. And in no world does it make sense to force hundreds of thousands of people to pay more taxes - under the penalty of prison - so that 65 copies of Lord Crayle’s Secret World can be made available.