I 💚 Libraries

A Library Science Student’s Library Appreciation Page

[wildflowerdaysi]

The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading

[clonerightsagenda]

My mom is jobhunting because their ACA premiums went up so much, and she interviewed for a public library job where she asked them to describe the kinds of reference questions they got. The interviewers paused for a bit and one of them said, "Well I'm thinking of a really weird one but I'm not sure we should say it..." and my mom said "was it the spanking man?" and they said "YES it was the spanking man". Good to know 8 years later his legend lives on

[clonerightsagenda]

isaacsapphire Wait what

I could have sworn I'd told the spanking man story on here but I can't find it when I search, so here it is again:

Back when I was a graduate assistant in library school, I did a reference desk shift at our main university library. We got a surprising amount of community users, including phone reference. (I had one guy who said he called us because his kid went there and thus he paid my salary.) So one day I get a call with a Wisconsin caller ID. I pick it up and a man asks "What information do you have on adult spanking?"

"What about spanking?" I ask, businesslike, since that's how we're trained and honestly at this point the question isn't that weird. "Debates over the ethics? Statistics about frequency? Something else?"

"Frequency," he says.

After I determine that he's not a student and thus does not have access to our databases, I do a quick Academic Search Complete search and start sharing some stats with him. He seems dissatisfied. I mention we have one audiovisual result and he perks up at that, but he can't access it as a non-student.

I probably should have caught on at this point, but I'm in reference librarian mode. I'm on a mission. I am going to find this man his spanking information. Since he's not a student, I suggest we switch to Worldcat to find materials he might be able to access. I try to refine the reference interview to figure out exactly what he wants, but he keeps repeating the phrase "good old fashioned across the knees adult spanking."

A light bulb belatedly sparks to life in my brain. "Sir," I ask on the phone, very carefully. After all, librarians are not here to sit in judgment. We just need to know what we're looking for. "Are you talking about disciplinary or... recreational?"

"Disciplinary," he insists. I have my doubts.

We spend a bit more time on Worldcat before I tell him that I have students waiting but recommend he search Worldcat on his own and check for libraries near him. This is before Worldcat sucked. At our next GA meeting I mention this weird call I got, and every GA starts yelling that they also got the spanking man. Except, I will note, the one guy on staff. It later comes out that his end goal is to get women to read Amazon summaries of books about spanking to him and he managed to convince one of our older employees to do that for quite some time. Sigh.

Anyway a year later I was at a state library conference and mentioned the spanking man and several librarians from across the state went THAT GUY and one of them mentioned seeing him discussed on an ALA facebook page so. It's not uncommon for callers to get banned from one library and move on to the next. He may still be out there. At the very least his legend is.

[radedneko]

Oh, he is. A few years ago, he was going through all the public libraries in New York state. He called our branch several times clearly trying to find someone who would play along as opposed to asking repeatedly for his library card number or name to 'put some relevant items on hold' for him because we had been warned ahead of time by a different area branch. Hilariously, he once tried to make up a library card number. What he thought that would do for him is beyond me.

We also have Dictionary Man, a man who wants women to read dictionary definitions of provocative words aloud to him while he wanks off, and, more locally, 'guy who wants us to ban a title no one has and we don't think actually exists.'

Just in case you thought Spanking Guy was a one-off.

[clonerightsagenda]

He's worked his way over to the East Coast, huh? Life finds a way

[coreomajoris]

I can't believe I'm feeling a little left out that this guy never called any reference desk I worked.

[libraryvisitor]

Texas A&M is banning Plato, citing his “gender ideology.”

Today, Texas A&M resumes classes for the spring semester—but a number of canonized texts will not be welcomed back to school. The public res

Hello??

[libraryvisitor]

Library board ousted after voting to keep children’s book about trans boy

- Ben Brasch

A North Carolina county dissolved the board overseeing its public library after the board voted to keep a picture book about a transgender boy in the children’s section.

The Randolph County Board of Commissioners made its 3-2 decision earlier this week at a hearing where about 40 people spoke on the matter, county spokeswoman Amy Rudisill said.

Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at free-expression advocacy group PEN America, said Randolph County’s decision to dissolve its library board is among the most severe penalties she’s seen in response to a controversial book.

“It’s a pretty dramatic response to wanting to have diverse and inclusive books on shelves,” she added.

Conservatives’ objections to children’s books with LGBTQ+ themes, particularly those with transgender characters, have fueled a wave of challenges to schools and public libraries in recent years.

In 2024, the Warren County Board of Supervisors in Virginia took over their local public library over its resistance to removing books with LGBTQ+ content. Voters in Jamestown Township, Michigan, voted twice in recent years to defund their public library over LGBTQ+ themed books in its collection; in May, five librarians quit after an election gave conservatives control over the library’s board. And in October, the former director of the Gillette, Wyoming, library system received a $700,000 court settlement after alleging that she was unjustly fired for opposing efforts to remove books related to race and LGBTQ+ issues.

Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the conservative North Carolina Values Coalition, which urged people to attend the Randolph County Commission meeting, said she agreed with the commission’s decision to dissolve the library board.

The book at the center of the controversy, “Call Me Max,” depicts a transgender boy who asks his teacher to call him by his chosen name instead of the name on the attendance sheet.

That “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is,” Fitzgerald said. “Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning.”

The book has been banned by three school districts — Carmel, Indiana; Palm Beach County, Florida; Stillwater, Minnesota — and nationally by the Department of Defense in their military schools, Meehan said.

It also featured in a widely circulated image of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), where he held up a blown-up page from “Call Me Max” before signing a bill in 2022 that banned students from kindergarten to third grade from discussing anything related to sex or gender identity. The measure, widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, was later the subject of a legal settlement.

In Randolph County, debate over “Call Me Max” began earlier this year, when a patron asked that the book be moved from away from or higher up in children’s section, Rudisill said. Library staff reviewed the complaint and, on Oct. 9, the library board voted 5-2 to deny the request to move the book.

That led the county board of commissioners to take over the nine-member library board this week and dissolve it, as allowed by state law — with no stated plan to fill the resulting vacancies.

The board took action despite a fairly even split for and against the book during the public comment period at its meeting Monday.

The county itself is overwhelmingly Republican. The county, which is home to about 150,000 people, voted nearly four to one in favor of President Donald Trump.

The book’s author, Kyle Lukoff, who is a trans man, said the situation in Randolph County is particularly discouraging because the library and its board followed their county’s procedures for book challenges and were still punished.

“Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power,” Lukoff said. “If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality”

[libraryvisitor]

Public libraries in TX, LA, and MS are no longer protected by the First Amendment.

Six months ago, Anthony Aycock wrote a piece for this website called “How a Single Court Case Could Determine the Future of Book Banning in

Drew Broussard December 8, 2025 Six months ago, Anthony Aycock wrote a piece for this website called “How a Single Court Case Could Determine the Future of Book Banning in America” in which he detailed a case working its way through the American judicial system: Little v. Llano County. Aycock’s piece (and his subsequent appearance on The Lit Hub Podcast with lead plaintiff Leila Green Little) detailed the history of the case but the basic facts are these: in 2021, a group of residents in Llano County, Texas, began to challenge books in their public library system—books like Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen and the sex-ed book It’s Perfectly Normal. After seventeen books were removed, several other residents sued on First Amendment grounds, arguing that these books were being banned for content and thus represented a restriction of the freedom of expression. The case expanded and was then brought to the Fifth Circuit, which at first ruled with the plaintiffs, but shortly thereafter that ruling was vacated and a new judgement brought down that ruled against the plaintiffs. It was then brought to the Supreme Court. Today, the Supreme Court denied the writ of certiorari in the case, meaning that they will not hear arguments in the case and the lower court’s ruling will stand. As lead plaintiff Leila Green Little put it via email: “They will not hear our case. No explanation is given. This means that the en banc ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will remain in effect for Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This means that public library patrons have no First Amendment rights to access information. This means we now live in a censorship state.” In case the weight of that doesn’t hit you hard enough: this fucking sucks. There’s not really any other way to put it. I have no comforting words, nor do I feel that it is a time to mince whatever others I have available. This is fascism 101 and it is happening with our elected government’s stamp of approval. Worse, this is almost certainly only the beginning. Libraries and their patrons across the country have been battling tirelessly against challenges and bans like these and those fights will continue—but without a doubt, things are about to get much worse. It is almost a guarantee that we will see a new slew of challenges and bans popping up across the country and not just in “red states” or “conservative communities” but everywhere. Now is a good time to support the organizations fighting against these kinds of bans (Authors Against Book Bans and PEN are great places to start) but make no mistake: no matter how well-organized and coherent a fight we might make, there is very little that can ultimately be done against the kind of institutional power that has been brought to bear by a judicial system (SCOTUS but the lower courts as well) that cannot be held responsible by any structures in American life. Maybe the answer is packing the courts, maybe the answer is dismantling them altogether, maybe it’s running your own library system to share books with those who need them. But this government cannot, will not, and does not want to protect you or your god-given rights. A pox on all of their houses, and may none of the people responsible for this know peace ever again.

[bookporn]

[libraryadvocates]

Yesterday I said that bookmobiles are an instant reblog. Today, I learned that rule also applies to book donkeys.

[rockpapertheodore]

BIBLIOBURRO

[shutupgitsor]

i think it’s really important that everyone knows that this man (Luis Soriano) has his own children’s books

and the donkeys are called Alfa and Beto, by the way. if you even care

[blunderpuff]

once upon a time when Twilight was new (and not yet a movie), women and girls were clamoring for it in a manner that was heretofore unseen by library staff. they were literally stealing copies of it off the holds shelf. (we had to keep the books in the back. Everyone else's Holds items were safe.)

and the mantra about Twilight (and about Harry Potter) was "it's introducing kids [who are otherwise avoidant/reluctant to read] to reading for fun!" because the thought was that Twi/HP would ignite that kid's love of reading, and they would find out that having fun wasn't hard if they got a library card etc

HOWEVER

it turns out that was NOT the case; kids who read Twi/HP went on to read... literally nothing else. They stopped there. They read Twi/HP and then they never picked up any different/other books. Denizens of the internet may recognize the new mantra of "Read literally any other book" when dealing with a post-2018 Potterhead.

And this generation's crop of Kids Who Can't Read Good is the Booktok Girlies. These Girlies will only read what they're told to read by Booktok Influencers. They come into the library, clamoring for this week's Hot Title, and then get upset when we tell them there's 30+ holds on 4 copies. So they angrily put themselves on the waiting list for it.

And next week, they come in to clamor for the next Hot Title, and have us cancel their hold on the item from last week. They don't care about reading the book; they care about keeping up with the crowd.

Our system has this automatic purchase request function that gets activated for every 7th hold an an item. The idea is that "If 7 or more people want this specific thing at the same time, then we don't own enough copies of this specific thing and we should buy more" This helps us keep our collection relevant to what the public is interested in borrowing.

The Booktok girlies have totally fucked our purchase request function, because we'll get upwards of 50 holds on a specific item in one week, activating the order requests... and then most of those holds are cancelled the following week because the Booktok Influencers are shilling the next Canva-cover ~spicy~ slop, and the Kids Who Can't Read Good have just got to have the next book instead.

We had to turn off the automatic purchase request because our very tight budget was suddenly getting earmarked for waayyyy more regular print adult fiction than we usually buy. And when the librarians were double-checking the purchase requests against the holds request list for specific items... it didn't make any sense. "Why did the automatic purchase request flag for 3 copies of this book, when we have three copies, and there's only 4 holds on it?" Because the other 40+ holds cancelled a week after being placed.

So you'd think that if these young women were coming into the library to ask for a specific book they heard about on tiktok, and can't immediately get their hands on it, maybe just maybe they would be inclined to pick up a similar item to tide them over? Nope. They just leave. They don't check anything else out. They ignore our topical displays with stuff like "So You Loved The L*ve Hyp*thesis... Here's Some Read-Alikes!" and they simply do not read anything they haven't been parasocially advertised to read.

And don't get me started on how I don't think the Booktok Influencers aren't actually reading any of the books they purport to be reading and sharing online, either.

[theprofessional-amateur]

For no reason here is a library story

[theprofessional-amateur]

There will be millions of actions like this over the coming years. An important thing to remember is that for them to work (anywhere, not just libraries) is people absolutely can’t announce that this is what they are doing.

Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.

Something to keep in mind.

[libraryvisitor]

[typewriter-post]

[libraryvisitor]

Commerce Township Community Library

[libraryvisitor]

Amicus-Noctis, Reddit.

[parkchanwoohoo]

a little kid came up to the desk (it came up to his like, collarbone) and very seriously asked me about baby name books, because he wanted to help name his new sibling. i guided him to the shelf (there were only two book of names) and pointed out the differences between them, and after some serious contemplation he went, “I think I should take both, just in case.” So I gave him both and he thanked me and went on his way.

And I went back to my desk and screamed into my arm for like 45 years because HE WAS SO FUCKING ADORABLE AAAAA

[parkchanwoohoo]

i love when little kids come to the reference desk alone because they want to be perceived as an adult and so they come up to you and very seriously inquire “Where are your books about dolphins? ò__ó”

and of course you have to very seriously show them your collection of dolphin books while they nod carefully at your explanations and it’s SO CUTE!!! THEY’RE SO CUTE AAAH

[andletforsakendidodie]

a kid came up to me to enquire about books on queen victoria, so I promptly guided him to the children’s history section, and we had a lovely chat flicking through horrible histories books, when I asked him what does he like about history. he grinned, and with a smooth, brilliant smile he said “My favourite thing about old times is torture.”

[wakingfromthewater]

One time I had a dad come in with his ~10 year old kid and go “Hi, we’re looking for, um…” at which point he trailed off and looked expectantly at the kid the way parents usually do when they can’t remember which Percy Jackson book comes next, but instead the kid looked up at me and very brightly and firmly announced, “The Federalist Papers!”

[platypusisnotonfire]

I had a kid come in all the time by herself after school, and she was hands down my favorite patron of all time. 5 years after I met her, she graduated 8th grade, so she was….8 or 9 when she first came in? Young enough that I was like “where is parent? I guess I am your mom now. you are safe in the library, child.”

The very first book she asked for was a book on Morse code. I was instantaneously enthralled with this child. Over the years, she took out books on first nations religions, the war of 1812, Ulysses by james joyce, books about tracking animals and identifying pawprints, basket weaving, loom weaving, the battle of Agincourt, honestly way too many things to remember. 

100% of the topics she was into were not typically “age-appropriate” (although I am a staunch believer in there being no age-appropriate subjects, just age-appropriate ways of explaining them) and about half of them required interlibrary loan requests because the topic was so esoteric the only books on it existed in some university library on the other side of the country. 

Some evenings she would come in after school and it would be a big snow day so there was hardly anyone there, and we’d just talk until the library closed, looking things up on google when she had a sudden inspiration to know something. Topics ranged from the physics behind a woodpecker’s tongue wrapping around its brain (she taught me about that one) to “Horrible bear bear” and the “bear circle” and the “anti-bear circle” (latin and greek roots of bear names and the Arctic.) She was just like, the coolest person. 

I really hope to meet up with her again someday because I really think these kinds of things have a circular effect- I’m thinking back to when I first moved to that town at 13 and went into that same library, marching up to the front desk and asking for books on astrophysics (probably looking even younger, I’m 26 now and people peg me for 14-16 consistently), and how the librarian- who later became my boss- must have felt about tiny me when she was putting in interlibrary loan requests for specific textbooks from MIT to go along with the OpenCourseWare courses I was taking online (which I gained much greater respect for when I became the interlibrary loan technician- holy Hannah that’s a lot of steps.) 

Anyway that was literally my favorite part about working at the library.

[certifiedlibraryposts]

Certified Library Post

[zenwannabe]

a dude came into the library stoned out of his mind and was like, “do I need a library card to look at books?” And I said, “to take books home, yes. To look at them, no” and he looked so relieved. bro was staring at a fish encyclopedia for like an hour and then just left.

[dabblingindissent]

this is literally all society needs to be

[barbwritesstuff]

I have learnt today that my library refers to me as 'the specific and highly active user' and has denied some of my purchase requests because 'we can't skew the collection too much toward the taste of the specific and highly active user'.

I did suggest roughly 100 vampire books for purchase last year. I think this probably has something to do with that.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

op is there any particular reason the librarians would feel safer not invoking you by name

[periodinteriors]

John Carter, View of the Library at Strawberry Hill, 1788, watercolor.

[gliklofhameln]

Poster by Arthur Szyk for the Jewish Book Council of America/National Jewish Welfare Board, 1947.