You may find books as old as the library itself

The Story:  This book, shockingly, did not get discovered while weeding.  We hadn't gotten to that section yet.  No, no.  We discovered this book because someone checked it out.  I'll let that sink in for a moment as you take a look at the age and condition of this title.

So, somebody saw this haggard old thing with yellowed, brittle pages, a strong rotten-book smell, and a gross misunderstanding of the word, "modern", and said, "Yes, this is the book for me.".  I'm sure at one point in its life, namely 1934 when it was published, this book would have been considered modern.  Now, however, anything whose published date starts with "19-anything", cannot rightly use the word "modern" to describe it.

What is more strange about this book still existing and actually being checked out is the fact that someone wanted to convey the message that they enjoyed it, so they wrote "good book" multiple times on it in barely disguised handwriting all from the same person throughout the front matter (a couple examples pictured above).  Like this glowing review is going to save this book from being ditched the second a librarian lays eyes on it.

As you can see, the book is in horrendous shape.  The pages are so yellow that they're brown, practically the same color as a wooden desk.

Aside from the one check-out which alerted staff to this book's existence, the thing hadn't been checked out at all since we moved away from stamping books in the late '90s.  What gets me is that at some point, someone had to add a barcode to this thing and create a digital record for it.  Nobody ever paused to think, "Maybe this title's not worth it."

1934, the year our library officially opened in its present building location, is the copyright date of this book.

Surprisingly, it has one color plate illustration in it, which I'm sure was very advanced technology for the time.

All condition notes aside, take a gander at the actual poems, intended for children, and their accompanying pictures.  These poems are not even in an actual language, though bearing minimal resemblance to English, and by today's standards are horribly racist.  For instance, the poem above teaches children to call a person from Italy a Dago, which is a racial slur.  From the point of an Italian, they got mad when someone called them a Dago, but then accepted it and called the name-caller something back.  In this case, they called an Irish person a Mc (pronounced "Mick", but characterized in this poem as "Meeck" because they're making fun of the Italian speaker's accent), which is another racial slur.  The previous poem compares the music and marching of a white band and a colored band marching down the street, basically saying that the white people play music better but the black people dance better and make it more fun.  Not all pictures of black people in old books are necessarily offensive caricatures, and it's hard to say if this one is originally intended to be, or if it was an accurate representation of what it looked like at the time, the black band in a parade, but it likely would not fly in the present political climate. 

And here we have a final illustration of both the awful physical condition of the book, and the bizarre nature of the poems themselves.  I mean, who writes a poem about a dog who breaks his leg or a mouse being chased out of its home?  They're just weird.

The Lesson:  You'll find bad books when you least expect it, and patrons will sometimes amaze you with what they choose to borrow.  No resources for this post, as no amount of library literature will prepare you for the quirky-at-best books you'll discover in an old collection.  I've found a number of truly terrible books in my time, and I'm trying to do a better job of documenting them for my own amusement and hopefully that of my fellow librarians.

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.