Banned in Hesperia
Postmus orders library to remove art history book
By BEAU YARBROUGH
Staff Writer
Last Wednesday, First District Supervisor Bill Postmus ordered San Bernardino County libraries to remove a book on the history of Japanese manga comic books that included images of sex.
Prior to last Wednesday’s removal, “Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics” by Paul Gravett was on the shelves at branch libraries in Hesperia, Apple Valley and Victorville.
In the Daily Press articles that first reported on the book’s presence in county libraries last week, the 16-year-old son of Victorville resident Cynthia Jones had told his mother the book contained sexual illustrations.
In Hesperia, librarian and branch manager Anne Marie Wentworth hadn’t heard any complaints about the book – and rarely any complaints at all.
“I can’t remember the last time somebody complained about a book,” she said. “The last time somebody complained about a book it was a graphic novel.”
Graphic novels are book-format comic books generally intended for more mature audiences. The graphic novel a resident complained about contained no sexual content, as Wentworth recalls, but was more violent than most young adult titles. The book was moved to the adult section of the library.
“They’re not all jumbled together. We have a children’s section, we have a young adult’s section and an adult’s section,” she said. “We don’t have any way of restraining people.”
They do place some works behind the circulation counter, but typically for reasons other than content.
“The only items that we have that we keep behind the circulation desk are the things that will get ripped off if we don’t,” Wentworth said. “If we don’t leave the latest copy of People magazine behind the desk, only one person would get to read it, because it would walk out of the building.”
The relative lack of complaints is typical of the county library system as a whole, said Ed Kieczykowski, County Librarian, the head of the library system.
“I would say we get half a dozen a year,” he said last week. “This is the first one where it’s actually [been taken] this far.
“Most people are OK with our explanation that it’s real difficult for us to put value judgements on books when we’re just trying to have a well-rounded collection,” Kieczykowski said. “There’s no practical way to monitor what a kid sees. We’re not here to act in loco parentis.”
He compared the library to a video store, where parents typically monitor what their children are renting. He also is planning on taking a cue from what some video stores to deal with an issue similar to the one the library system is facing.
“I’m going to look at some technology solutions that maybe give the parents the [ability] to choose what’s appropriate for their children.” Postmus has asked the librarians to come up with a system to keep adult books out of childrens’ hands.
“Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics” was not seen by many county residents before its removal.
“We’ve had this book for over a year, and I think it’s circulated 125 times and we haven’t had any complaints.” The Hesperia copy was checked out fewer than 20 times, Wentworth said.
“We probably order 25,000 titles a year and we probably have two people who look at this stuff,” Kieczykowski said.
But in retrospect, he said he can see other libraries have made a judgement similar to the one Postmus made.
Only “about 25 percent of the libraries in California have this book,” he said. “Although [the manga] genre is really popular, some of those illustrations probably pushed it over the edge.”
Manga is much more prominent and mainstream in Japan than comic books now are in America: Weekly comic book sales in Japan exceed the entire annual sales of the American comic industry.
“If you’re going to write the definitive history of this genre — 40 percent of what’s written in Japan is written in this genre — if you didn’t have the explicit stuff in it, it wouldn’t be definitive,” Kieczykowski said.
This isn’t the first time a book has been removed from the county library system, but most such decisions don’t make it into the newspaper.
The librarians “have removed books from their collection, but just because of things they’ve noticed,” said Postmus’ spokesman, David Zook. “There you have an ongoing review process, and they remove books that are no longer current or up to date or of interest to anyone.”
Readers interested in the comprehensive history of manga will still be able to get “Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics” through county libraries, they just won’t be able to stumble across it on the shelves.
“The reality is with our electronic connectivity, people can request that book and we can get it for them,” Kieczykowski said. The county’s library system is integrated with other regional county library systems and the counties have a lending program in place.
According to an online search of the card catalog, the county library includes Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (about a man’s affair with an underage girl), multiple versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (one of the first sexually explicit novels in the English language), erotica by Anais Nin, sexually charged novels by Henry Miller and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Kama Sutra.
“The situation, I guess, is different than most of them. There are, I’m sure, other books with explicit material in them, but this is particularly egregious, because a book that’s about comics … and where children could look at them,” Zook said. “There are other books that have text that’s inappropriate for children, but because it’s pictures, it’s much more likely that children would be exposed to them.”
None of those books have generated the complaints – or the political response – this one art history book did.
Kieczykowski believes “the visual stimulation that videos and movies” might have changed things: “a lot of the material that we might have many years ago had a complaint about, we don’t hear any more. … It’s the visual that’s the big issue.”
Zook said Postmus isn’t ruling out getting involved in what the county libraries stock on their shelves in the future.
“If there was something else that came up that was this severe, he might get involved. … He has asked the library come up with a way that the library can identify books that are inappropriate for children.”
Years ago, following a show by radio talk show host Dr. Laura, there were a brief flurry of complaints about county libraries providing access to Internet pornography through their public terminals, until Kieczykowski and his staff explained the library system filters out such content.
“We really don’t have a lot of complaints and a lot of our parents take their responsibility seriously and they monitor what their kids take out when they’re walking around the library,” he said.
Beau Yarbrough can be reached at beau@hesperiastar.com or by telephone at 956-7108.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
