kaligrafr wrote:
> I wonder what that librarian really meant by *those* kinds of books...? 
>
> Was it the *occult* character of the books? Or the *minor* literary status
> of the 
> author and his novels? 
>   
This is an excellent point, and I'd go somewhat farther with it. I'm 
sure there is some bias in question here, but I find it rather odd and 
hard to account for. Occult books are among the most stolen from 
academic libraries, along with religious texts (especially Catholic), 
which goes to show that there are a lot of occult books in academic 
libraries in the first place.

It sounds to me, frankly, as though this particular librarian was 
talking out of an improper orifice. What sort of academic library 
doesn't have any occult books? I mean, okay, so you decided not to buy, 
let's see, any of the last thirty years of early modern history of 
science, like Yates and Debus and Newman and so on. You decided not to 
buy any of the last twenty-five years or so of distinguished 
publications on the history of witchcraft, like Carlo Ginzburg. You 
decided not to buy any French symbolist fiction or poetry, like 
Huysmans. You decided not to buy any of the English fiction or poetry 
influenced by this, like Yeats, Eliot, and Wilde. You decided not to buy 
the most popular 19th century English fiction, like Bulwer-Lytton. You 
decided not to buy any of the things by or influenced by theosophy, nor 
works about theosophy.

Eh?

If some fathead librarian at an academic library told me this, I would 
promptly go find the LC designation BF and march to right around 1600, 
just after abnormal psychology. If I couldn't drag the librarian with 
me, I would now take down a shelfload of the books and march them down 
to the librarian. I would now demand to know what the hell he or she was 
talking about. Incidentally, I would now have attracted an enormous 
amount of attention with this little charade, and quite likely this 
would have attracted the attention, specifically, of a senior librarian 
or bibliographer, i.e. someone with a clue. And, with luck, I would get 
an actual answer to my question, "why no Brodie-Innes?" Which might or 
might not be helpful.

Of course, along the way I would grossly offend this person, but there 
is some fun in that.

But I simply do not believe that any academic library calling itself 
such just does not have anything that could be classified as "occult." 
How would this be possible? I mean, for pete's sake how would you have 
an anthropology collection when you'd have to cut Mauss, Malinowski, 
Radcliffe-Brown, Levy-Bruhl, Horton, and on and on. You'd have to cut 
Eliade -- he even wrote a book entitled _Occultism, Witchcraft, and 
Cultural Fashion_, so would you not buy that?

I'm sorry, but there just has to be something wrong with this story, and 
I suspect it's just that this librarian was being an idiot. I think one 
really shouldn't read much more into it than that.

Public librarians, well, that's quite a different thing, because it is 
very much a political matter what is and is not put into a public 
library, especially one owned by some governmental branch. On the whole, 
though, such librarians tend to be the ones trying to get things 
un-banned, not the reverse. But I must say that if I were running a 
public library without a truly huge operating budget, occult books would 
not be high on my list: I want things that will circulate to the maximum 
number of my main audience, i.e. fiction for young people and fiction 
for middle-aged to elderly people, as well as some how-to sorts of 
books. Then I want enough actually good fiction that when some of these 
folks come to me and say, "I've read every book by so-and-so, what do I 
read now?" I can say, "Gee, have you tried Madame Bovary?" and hopefully 
get them hooked. The occult? Small audience, vast range of publications 
coming out continually, I the librarian probably know nothing about it 
and so can't choose a representative sample, so this isn't going to be 
big for me.


Yours,
Chris Lehrich

-- 
Christopher I. Lehrich
Assistant Professor of Religion
Associate Director, Division of Religious and Theological Studies
Boston University