Selfish Check-out at the Berkeley Public Library

The Berkeley Public Library is highly invested in getting Urban Fiction out to the public. These are paperback novels that feature “sexuality, drug use, drug dealing, and street violence.” With their lurid covers they tend to be raunchy and, a librarian told me, many of them are being stolen. After I saw a large number missing I asked a librarian why they weren’t listed as missing. She told me since the library is going to replace the stolen items soon that they just remove “available” and “request.”

So many missing makes one wonder what kind of dysfunction is going on here. They have close to two hundred listings and as of April 22 there were 44 missing, on the 18th of April there were only 39 missing. These are just the current robberies of these books that have been coming into the library at least since 2006.

The books deal mostly with the pitfalls of the hood with lots of complicated sex. One of the pornographic ones a person of any age can sample text on the online catalog. That is seriously questionable promotion!

The reason I wonder about the library’s investment is due to the fact that this is not mainstream writing. I would think if the library is so aware of this problem that they would put all of this writing in one safe place.

Thomas Lynch