You may find books that are old enough to be your mother

Weeding is always a fun time for me.  It feels so liberating and productive to cull the herd, trim the fat, impose my vision of a perfect and relevant collection upon the existing shelves, and just plain throw shit out.  There are many wonderful weeding resources out there, and this is one of the things they taught most of us very well in library school.  However, I find myself continually unprepared for some of the things that manage to somehow stay on the shelves well past their useful life (although some books make it hard to imagine that they had a useful life at all).  There are some egregiously racist titles that I wish I had snapped pictures of early on in my career, just for the shock value of them, but alas, I was not so far-sighted as to see myself wanting to share these crimes against collection development with the world.  Be heartened to know that in a millennium starting with "20" there was a library in the world with such titles as, "How to Speak Black" (an actual dictionary/language resource), and "A Negro's Guide to Manners" still in circulation.

For now, though, let me share some examples of some great discards from a very recent weeding project.

One of the first books I would like to draw your attention to is this collection of national anthems from 1967.

Let's just take in this cover for a moment.  Mono-colored flags in a crude, no doubt intended to be "minimalist" or some nonsense, illustration.  Doesn't it just cry out to be picked up and read?  Also, let's not forget that this was in the children's collection.  Really high-interest-level stuff here.

There are a dozen African nations that have come into their own since this book was published, nine from the Americas, thirteen from Asia, up to nine from Europe, almost all of Oceania, and three others considered "transcontinental".  Not to mention all of the territories and civil wars and borders that change daily in Africa and the Middle East.  So, if you're going to have a book on national anthems, maybe one that includes all the current 195-ish recognized nations would be a good start.

And for our bonus feature, let's take a look at some of the dated language on this table of contents.  Who calls Asia "The Orient" anymore?

Moving on.

Our next book is called, "Let's Do Fingerplays" and it's from 1962.  Now, fingerplays themselves don't necessarily go out of style.  I mean, we all know the Itsy-Bitsy Spider, but really, who says "water spout"?  Who even knows what it is anymore?  We all just say "gutter".  Anyway, the problem is not with the timeless content here, but every decade or so, things like this could use a new presentation.  Like with pages that aren't yellow and smelly, and illustrations that aren't so tragic.

Again with the monocolor.  Of course, adults would be using this book rather than children by themselves, but that's no excuse for a bad cover.

Dominion of Canada?  Nobody's used that ever in my lifetime that I can recall.  I had to look it up.

I said I wasn't against the content, but really, who wants to sing this strange song about a metronome?  Kids who are of the fingerplay age don't really know what one is yet.

And the piéce de résistance:  this illustration.  It looks like the child is demented and breaking the neck of her baby doll, which makes the words of this rhyme, "Good Little Mother" a little bit macabre.

And the oldest book we deleted in this round of weeding was a book of folksongs for children from 1948.  I'm sure some of the songs have dwindled in popularity since then.

Also, lithographed in the USA.  Not printed.  I'm not really sure why they specifically said "lithographed".  And I'm pretty sure they weren't using the modern offset lithography that printing these days often uses.  When the technology used to create the book in your hands no longer exists, or is reserved for fine art students, it's maybe a sign to chuck it.

Many of these books are old enough to be my mother.  Many of them have seen war, revolution, the fall of the Soviet Union, and still they remain on the shelf, oblivious, waiting in vain to be read by someone and made useful again.  These books may also pre-date the existence of frisbees, cable television, lint rollers, barcodes, lasers, spandex, and coolers.  What I find crazy is that someone had to add a barcode to each of these books, create a computerized record for it, and add it to the system way back in the '80s or '90s or whenever the library went digital.  A lot has happened since 1948, and nobody anywhere along the way thought, "Maybe these books aren't worth the trouble".

This probably won't be the only making-fun-of-weeded-books post that I do, because clearly, if books like this are still out there, I've got a lot more collection development to do.