Public Library of American Public Library Deaccession
A catalog of withdrawn public library materials from around the United States
Sexy Librarian is published by Slush Editions/Ellen Lupton
EPILOGUE
Originally, this book was about rejection.
Not the kind of rejection where you dump your boyfriend for his brother, but rather something far more institutional and far less sexy. The story behind the story of Sexy Librarian is inextricably linked with another narrative, that of a two-year alternative research project aimed at a sculptural installation that I began in the summer of 2005. Describing the intentions of this work is the only way to explain why I spent months writing a novel that I hoped no one would publish and that I thought only six editorial assistants would ever read.
The larger project was called The Public Library of American Public Library Deaccession, and as the name suggests, it was an exploration of the books that libraries withdraw from their collections. The endeavor, which I undertook with fellow artist Maayan Pearl, was an attempt to create an archive, both physical and digital, of books I found being discarded from the libraries of the U.S.’s most literate cities. After a year, the catalog I created included over five thousand deaccessioned books from twenty-five states.
In my travels, I focused only on nonfiction material, titles removed in the perpetual and vital library process of replacing older, less accurate, less popular, repetitive and/or damaged books. Animals in peril: a guide to the endangered animals of Canada and the United States from 1978 (found discarded: Wichita Public Library, May 27, 2006) is necessarily replaced with Endangered: Wildlife on the Brink of Extinction from 2007, in order to retain the most up-to-date collection for public reference. My project concerned itself exclusively with Fact, but I was interested in how Fiction, being outside questions of accuracy, fit more uneasily into this sensible, systematic process.
While examining texts like The changing patterns of the Middle East from 1961 (found discarded: Boston Public Library, December 2, 2006), I found myself constantly looking to the other side of the room, where shelf after shelf after shelf of withdrawn romance novels had been put out. The sheer volume of discarded titles in this subject area, removed paperback fantasies by the truck load [FIG. 1], was astounding. Marriage Bargain (Cowboy Grooms Wanted!) (2000), branded with the word DISCARD on the inside cover, seemed to quite self-sufficiently articulate the poignancy of amassed literary detritus.
I took a part-time volunteer position “weeding” the collection of a small public library in Minnesota, removing books from the shelves and catalog based on a list compiled by the Head of Reader Services [FIG. 2]. I quickly learned that romance novels have the shortest shelf life of any subcategory of popular fiction. The romances I withdrew were almost instantly replaced with new love stories; there was an intense consumptive drive for fresh titles. It seemed that the community’s appetite for the genre was never satisfied, and yet never discouraged.
The relationship of romance novels to the institutional reality of public library collection management is a ripe point of entry into questioning the procedure's evaluative methodology. How does one determine the inaccuracy, obsolescence or unpopularity of a romance novel? Circulation statistics seem to be an objective measure, and a helpful tool for deselection—especially for popular fiction—but collective fantasy is fickle and organic. How can one be sure that cowboys bartering their vows will not be the hot topic in five months time, in five years time? How can a librarian predict circulation of the future, decide what love stories should be on the horizon to quicken the heart when we get there? With these questions in mind, I began amassing deaccessioned romances and reading them while I was traveling alone to new highly literate cities, when I was putting off my to-catalog list, or when I got home, tired, from my position at the library.
After the third or fourth book, I began to see that my research about deaccession would benefit from an outlet for sympathy. Despite my curiosity about the longevity of paperback fiction, I had only a limited empathetic capacity for the books and authors I was traipsing around the country to find because I had no idea what it felt like to write literature that had been determined by an institution as unpopular or unnecessary. I tried reading the “about the author” section, looking up the fate of other titles they had written, imagining them frowning in their author photos, but that didn’t really do if for me. It became clear quickly that there was only one way to truly understand how it felt to be spurned.
I had to write a book myself, submit it to publishing houses, and wait for it to be rejected.
I started working on Sexy Librarian somewhere in Iowa, in the summer of 2006, allowing myself nothing to read but deaccessioned romance novels. The formulas so rigorously defining the genre and the exclusionary context of my source material ever-present in my mind, I produced an unagented, unsolicited, three-chapter manuscript (per industry standard) by September then submitted it to the “slush pile” of six commercial publishing houses.
To maximize the effect of the expected rejection, I wrote Sexy Librarian quasi-autobiographically, as an anecdotal contemplation of the relationship between sexuality and information science. Retrospection was an important tool, given my démodé research guides, and for the rebuff to be, stingingly, of the stories of my own life. I allowed the isolating, wanderlust nature of the project’s priorities and the exclusionary context I was entrenched in to pervade the narrative, as well as my amateur librarianism and the New York-centricity of the art context I was working within.
Several months after the completion of the manuscript, I met with a certain type of success: each of the six publishing houses to which I submitted the book did, indeed, reject the proposal. Their reasons most often included the elusive explanation that the project was not right for them at that time. Other explanations noted insufficiencies in the strength of the writing, and one publisher pointed out that the mention of sexually-transmitted diseases destroyed the “fantasy factor” of safe sex and monogamy, thereby turning off their readership.
With this labor-intensive experiment bookended, I closed my chapter as a romance novelist and focused on exhibiting my ideas about deaccession. In this context, I saw the way I approached the publishing industry as an alternative process for producing sculptures—records or objects that physically document the communication of a personal perspective on ideas and themes. I was excited that the paper trail of Sexy Librarian’s failure could be art, the medium: ‘rejection on letterhead’ or ‘electronic rejection, dimensions variable.’ My installation The Public Library of Public Library Deaccession, which finally opened in May 2007, functioned as a usable and productive reading room of discarded material as well as an extended sculptural moratorium. The responses to Sexy Librarian were displayed on the wall in archival plastic sheaths. Ruminations on the ideas of absence and loss mediated by the organization, classification, and object-oriented context of information services saturated the rest of the installation.
One piece, a cross-stitched travel pillow also made en-route, was produced using craft techniques that I had learned by reading up on “American Handiwork” in a discarded how-to book. The pillow read: “I Miss You Like Hell,” and was used for naps during long stretches in my Dodge Neon [FIG. 4]. The romance novels I read on the road, were ultimately eulogized representationally. First, they were ground into a crematory pulp; then they were cast into map pins; and finally they were used to mark statistically proportionate drawings of the states visited during their readings [FIG. 3]. These pieces functioned like souvenirs of my travels to the world of Obsolescence, and like Sexy Librarian, they served a kind of practical function within my alternative research process (which itself allowed me to also collect the information needed to fabricate my sculptural works).
Act two of Sexy Librarian began at the opening of the exhibition I had been working toward. Ellen Lupton, not a commercial publishing house per se but a formidable power in her own right, offered to publish the novel, without having read anything except, appropriately, the rejection letters.
At that point, I began to finish the novel where I had left off, at Chapter Four. I put down the deaccessioned romance novels and began reading only classics. These books, although antiquated, had for some reason remained relevant, protected from progress with a kind of diplomatic immunity that ensured their continued presence on library shelves. The prologue and first three chapters of Sexy Librarian are essentially the manuscript Harlequin received—albeit more grammatically correct. Published in this volume are, therefore, two opposite approaches to the same question: what is the romance novel that readers will want tomorrow?
Where Sexy Librarian will fall in the rubric in between Crystal (found discarded: Enoch Pratt Free Library/Baltimore Public Library, January 6, 2007) and Jane Eyre remains to be seen. I cannot think of a truer test than how long it is made accessible to the public for free, to do with as they please—so long as they return it.
© 2008 Julia Weist
