Travel days, March 28 - April 9: Seattle, Washington, to Washington, D.C. and back.

I am putting my library tour on pause for two weeks. During this time I will be visiting my sisters for Easter and going to my Bethesda home to take care of various chores. Ayse and I are both driving to Columbus, Ohio to attend the Public Library Association (PLA) Annual Conference. She will be trying to sell her book, and I will be speaking with potential publishers about mine. I will return to Seattle and Goldfinger on Monday, April 8.

The in-person PLA conference in Columbus, Ohio was a bust for me. Obviously, but not to me, there are no book buyers at the conference: publishing houses are there to display their wares, not to find new ones. I did pick up a few freebies and swag, however. Who doesn’t want more pens, stickers, and book bags! 

A couple displayed books caught my eyes. White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy contained the section “Dangerous Ideas, Coming from Your Local Library” begins with

The sense that alien and morally degraded ideas are encroaching has produced a backlash on the right, one that is newly aggressive and willing to use government power to restore what people perceive they have lost. In many rural areas, this has meant conservatives trying to seize control of a place where people believe their values have been particularly undermined: the local library...At libraries all over the country, conservatives are using their political power to attempt a takeover of this one area [the library] of the culture. 

At the library in Llano, Texas, locals protested the book I Need a New Butt!, with one resident writing a local official an email about “The Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Library” involving Butt and other books, mainly those by or about LGBTQ issues or racism. During a lawsuit over whether these books could remain on the shelves, one resident wrote that “I am for closing the library until we get this filth off the shelves.” While this may (or may not) reflect popular sentiment, it does only take a few motivated advocates to discipline (or at least disrupt) a library. The authors, Thomas F. Schaller, Paul Waldman, and Tom Schaller, argue that while “[t]hese controversies are not exactly new…they are becoming more frequent and more intense.” One local librarian, Kathy Zappitello, acknowledged that (according to the authors) “the library had changed from a place to find information to a locus of ominous social developments, a place that, to many, is part of the outside forces that are threatening the rural way of life.” I can sympathize with this point of view, while mentioning that the rural way of life is more threatened by what’s on the phones in your childrens’ pockets than what is on the shelf of your library. In comparison to that, the library is a garden, with the fruits of the tree of knowledge, with much less temptation.

One book to add to my reading list: The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America, by Christopher Gorham.

Joining the American Library Association, so that I could attend the PLA conference, proved more useful, as doing so gave me access to the chat boards for both associations. I posted a description of my project and asked for help collecting information, and received about a half dozen high-quality responses. One asked me not to forget about the role of BIPOC individuals: BIPOC is academic jargon for ‘Blacks, Indigenous, and People of Color”. Another gentleman, Bob Sink, is the retired archivist of the New York Public Library, and he is writing a social history of the women who worked in NYPL's branch system, 1901-1950. He began his project by writing blog posts on the birthdays of the women who were directors of NYPL branch libraries, which has proven an invaluable source of information. He now has about a thousand women in his database. I appreciate his generosity in sharing all his material with me.

He also confirmed one of my anecdotal observations. One of the challenges I have discovered in researching librarians is that they never married, and so did not leave heirs I could contact for additional information. Sink wrote to me that 60 percent of the librarians he researched never married, so their diaries and letters rarely survived their deaths. That much information has been digitized is no guarantee that it will remain available. According to the Pew Research Center in a 2024 report, almost 40 percent of the web pages that existed in 2013 were not accessible just one decade later. And very few of the libraries that I visited had even tried to digitize their own histories.

Bonus: total eclipse in Cleveland on April 8.