Weeding at the Library

Every year or so, we analyze our library collection to see which books haven't been circulating. Shelf space is limited, and we have a large network of libraries, so duplicate items that don't get read need to go so we have room to expand what people are reading. This process is known as weeding. We keep classics, of course, but sometimes we need to replace old books that have had a lot of wear and tear, so we ordered a new copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, for example. What I really noticed this week as I was going through our weeding list was how much reading tastes have changed.

Without weeding, the library would soon look like this. Image credit

There are very few new Westerns being written. The spy novels featuring characters like James Bond and Jason Bourne are also basically gone. Supernatural thrillers like those by Stephen King and Dean Koontz are falling out of favor. The classic detective fiction is almost entirely gone except for Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Modern police detective thrillers have been displaced by even more modern hyper-nationalistic counterterrorism novels, but those seem to be fading fast, too.

I haven't gotten to the MASSIVE quantity of James Patterson novels yet, but people read his books often enough that few will likely get pulled. Clive Cussler's books seem to stagnate in circulation beyond the first year of frenzied borrowing, and several were weeded. I also pulled several John Grisham books, as his popularity seems to have tanked in recent years. Romance novels in general seem to have a very short lifespan, and while Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel are prolific enough so their old unread stuff is usually replaced by new stuff that people will also only care about for a couple years, they're at least replacing what we weed from the collection as they churn out more schlock. People without their level of output are getting culled entirely. I pulled a lot of Fern Michaels novels yesterday, and I'm not sad to see them go.

I have also noticed that long-dead authors like Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, and Agatha Christie have new authors writing new books using their name as branding. That counterfeit crap makes someone a nice chunk of change and keeps the original author's estate getting a trickle of income, but I'd wager they have no staying power. They'll be weeded out in the next couple of years too, and no tears will be shed. Zombie authors with ghost writers? No thanks.

It's all part of the process of curation. We need the room for books people actually read, unless ours is the only copy in the district. It's just so strange to see how transitory popular fiction can be. It's easy to look back on the past and think how great literature was in the Victorian era, but realize that we only have the books that passed the test of time and remained relevant for over a century because they had a transcendent quality their innumerable forgotten contemporaries lacked.

It is also possible that good literature fell by the wayside and is waiting to be rediscovered, too. Go browse your library. Look for the old, faded, worn fiction. Borrow it. Read it. If it's good, encourage others to read it too. Keep the circulation stats current for good library books so they know there's still interest in something besides the latest New York Times bestsellers. Borrowing a book is like upvoting something good on Steemit, but it has huge benefits for much longer than a 1-week payout window.

I am stealing @generikat's #ramblewrite tag for these moderately-coherent musings. Go check out her blog, too!