Libraries do not exist to protect our country's brilliant but inaccessible works from disappearing--you're thinking of academia. The purpose of public libraries should be to give people whatever will get them reading. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I believe that once people get hooked on reading John Grisham, they'll work their way up to Harry Potter and then one of those horrible Oprah books, which takes them to Pride and Prejudice and then it's just a short hop over to Faulkner. It's a failing of both our educational system and our library system that we deprioritize "junk" and try to shove the classics down peoples' throats when they're not ready for them. If kids in school read Ender's Game instead of Sounder, maybe they wouldn't give up on books so early. It's sad that they're culling out the classics in libraries and in the best of all worlds we could have both, but if someone is coming into the library for the first time because they heard about The Bridges of Madison County on a radio show and thought they'd give it a try, I don't want them to go home empty-handed because the shelves are all filled up with the minor works of Henry James.

What I think is more interesting is the question of how libraries could convert the Oprah masses to better literature. For instance, I'd love to see the implementation of Amazon-style "recommendation" programs. Imagine checking out a trashy romance novel and getting recommendations for Jane Eyre and Nicholson Baker's Vox. Or Chandler for Grisham, or--well, you get the idea. Awesome, right?

Wasn't The Sound and the Fury an Oprah book club selection?

Your local library probably has plenty of copies of the paperback. They're probably even kind of dog-eared.

I can sign on with the first-hit's-free approach. Tolkien got me into reading, and I have no issue with John Grisham being somebody else's gateway drug.

But organizing a library after this data-driven, results-oriented Fairfax model isn't the way to do it. I see three problems. One, every librarian in the article is passing the buck—so long as the central library is carrying Faulkner (or Hemingway, or other good stuff listed), then the branch libraries aren't in danger. But this limits the pure pleasure of browsing, and if anecdotal evidence is any indication, a lot of people excited about this topic had the same experience as a kid: wondering around the stacks, picking up and paging through some weird book, and discovering something. You're hoping for the browse effect at neighborhood branches in particular—where librarians complain about being after-school day-care centers—but the Fairfax system intends either to ghettoize the classics at the central library, or not promote them. (It seems.)

Two, the results from the Fairfax libraries' software system are suspect. Are there prominent displays of the good stuff alongside the Chuck Palahniuk? It can't be a hard sell to get a kid reading Fight Club to hop over to Will Self. But if libraries are setting up The Five People You Meet in Heaven displays, then The Five People You Meet in Heaven is what people will read.

Third problem: I'm sympathetic to the view that broadcasting that libraries carry DVDs and comic books gets people in the door, but there's a point at which libraries begin to subsidize entertainment, to quote Julian. We don't pay taxes for libraries to keep copies of National Treasure on DVD. Well, I guess we do, actually, but I wish we wouldn't—that's what TNT is for.

I don't know if this is how librarians identify, but I think of them as curators of books, and it's distressing that such emphasis is placed on circulation beancounting, when reputation for accurate recommendations and so on would make for much stronger evaluations of libraries/librarians.

Oh yeah—libraries usage suffers from choice paralysis, so library suggestions are helpful (if not crucial).

I don't know why public libraries exist. I've been in a public library twice in the past decade, although I've been in university libraries a good deal more often. The key to improving access to books - this is really what libraries are intended to accomplish - is to reform copyright laws. I'd rather never set foot in a library again, but be able to access any book I want over the internet, and download that onto a digital book reader.

We were so disturbed here in Gwinnett County, GA, by the exact trend described in the Washington Post that we pulled out old library records, started a website www.gcplwatch.org (see our timeline section) and complained at the top of our lungs until the library director was finally fired. Now, thanks to a library board willing to buck the trend, we're returning to "a more traditional library." Well, hooray! The first thing the new director did was create a "classics" section at the library (can you believe we had none before?) and she even put it in a high traffic area.
Happy New Year.

I agree with all you say, but, given that the George Mason Regional Library is going to cull its collection, I make sure we get to the book sale every six months or so. It's where I got my 20 vol CUP reprint of the entire run of Scrutiny and my Man Without Qualities (the Wilkins/Kaiser translation, but what do you want for $10 for 3 vols?), among others.

I do have to say, though, that the bulk of the discards are formerly popular three-year-old novels: typically they aren't discarding Faulkner to make room for the latest John Grisham, they're discarding the John Grisham before last to make room for the latest.

I think schools are there to help get people excited about reading at the ages at which they learn to do it, and then libraries become a place to find more. Somehow I think of the public library as the home of the auto-didact, the guy you meet sometimes with no college degree who has read tremendously just because he wanted to do so. In the South, he inclines to antiquity and military history; in New York, I find him disturbingly well versed in leftist history and literature. But I do think the public library is supposed to exist for the benefit of that guy who works 9-5 and then comes to the library to take a book home and go into another world.