on banning books

adventures in little library curation

We have a little library at the sidewalk in front of our house. We put it there to encourage people to share books. We put it there to make it easier to thin out the book clutter in our house.

The library is popular. Over the past couple of years, we’ve hardly put out any books of our own. These days there are a lot of different people taking and leaving books. There’s not a lot of room there, so I need to be choosy about what gets shelf space. My job has become clearly one of curation.

From the etymology online dictionary:

curate:

from Medieval Latin curatus "one responsible for the care (of souls)”

Souls? I thought that sort of stuff was above my paygrade as a big boy librarian for a very little library. It wasn’t that long into the gig that I realized that these innocuous looking boxes have become platforms for soul capture.

There are days I find random poetry pamphlets left behind by someone who thinks that perhaps this is a great distribution channel. These are good days. I love delude…