San Bernardino County Librarian Ed Kieczykowski talks to Library Journal this week about the decision to pull Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics out of circulation because of sexual content, after a complaint from the mother of a 16-year-old who checked the book out.
Postmus issued a press release (pdf file) claiming he “ordered” the book removed, and Kieczykowski’s account doesn’t really contradict that:
He said he explained the library’s selection and reconsideration policy to the supervisor and they looked at the book together. Kieczykowski estimated that less than two percent of the book was sexually explicit, but Postmus “particularly didn’t like the page the cartoon character was having sex with the hamster. He said, ‘Do you think this is acceptable for our community?’ I said that we take the book as a whole, but I could understand why people would be upset.”
So Kieczykowski agreed to withdraw the book.
Unless the library’s reconsideration policy amounts to “sit down with a local politician and do what he says,” it sounds like Kieczykowski did an end run because Postmus told him to. Not very inspiring.
Kieczykowski goes on to say that residents can get the book from the Riverside library system, which shares a catalog with the San Bernardino County Library. I see two problems with this approach:
1. It’s hypocritical. If the book is too racy to be on the shelves in San Bernardino, shouldn’t it be too racy to be on the shelves in Riverside? Or are the San Berdo folks more moral than the Riverside folks?
2. It’s lame. How long will it take before some self-righteous person asks for the book to be pulled from the Riverside library too?
But wait, there’s more:
Postmus also was concerned that the book, though in the adult section, was near collections of comics that minors might seek out. Postmus also called for the library “to draft a plan to protect children from inappropriate books and other materials.” Kieczykowski said that most residents have no quarrel with the library’s procedures, but the library would look into the concept of a J-card.
I’m not familiar with the term J-card, but I assume it means a children’s library card with restricted privileges. I’d be interested in hearing what the librarians in the audience think of that idea.
Manga presents a special problem because it looks like kid stuff, but some of it isn’t, and the childlike quality makes the “adult” parts even more disturbing to some people (myself included). On the other hand, I have no idea what’s in the novels my daughter is reading (currently a series with titles like “Mates, Dates, and Mad Mistakes”), but I can flip through a manga in less than a minute and decide whether it’s OK or not. I wonder if the parent who complained has looked at the books her son reads.
Anyway, I think the book should be left on open shelves in the adult art section, as it was, but I would move the Peanuts and other kid cartoon anthologies in the children’s room. That would prevent the confusion that caused the problem to begin with, and adults can always get the book from the children’s librarians. Then parents who let their children use the adult library (which starts at age 11 in my library) should be aware that their children will be exposed to the full range of knowledge and culture there, and monitor their reading accordingly.
[...] Library update [...]
[...] Manga Blog has a ton of links and commentary about the San Bernadino County library’s decision to pull a non-fiction book about manga. [...]
I like Kieczykowski’s argument that since its only a small part of the book that’s explicit it shouldn’t be a big deal. If school cafeterias started including a single cigarette with lunch would that be okay? Its only a small part, where’s the harm? Some people like a smoke after a meal.
At Greg from Shush:
The argument isn’t that under 2% of explicit material makes the book okay, it’s that the low percentage means the book has literary value and was correctly shelved, and doesn’t deserve to be pulled from the adult section according to the standards set by, for example, US obscenity laws.
That something only has 2% of explicit material does not mean the book still has literary value. That the 2% includes beastility, something far and beyond where the general public draws the line as to what might be considered ‘explicit’, negates whatever else the book has to offer to the community.
I believe the “2%” is a legal standard that’s been set as president for what separates art analysis/history that deals with potentially offensive art and books that pretend to discuss the offensive art as an excuse to show pictures.
Greg, your second comment has nothing to do with the issue you previously brought up. You’re saying “It cannot have any value if it touches upon _____” (in this case bestiality). That’s an understandable argument to make, but it has nothing to do with the 2% standard mentioned by Keicykowski, you’re saying that dealing with bestiality in manga overrules any intellectual merit the book may have, that it trumps any educational value found in the rest of the book.
Sorry but it seems to me to be all part of the same argument. Yes, if the 2% was simply nude images, or even possibly sex-related, that would more likely be okay but Keicykowski is wrong to think that anything goes if its only 2% of the book.
Doesn’t anyone fact-check anything anymore? I don’t know about you, but to me “bestiality with a hampster” conjures up the nightmarish imagery of some guy tearing a poor fuzzy creature apart.
I didn’t remember anything like that in the book, so I decided to check it out. Lo and behold, the only thing I can guess that they were referring to was a couple of panels of Bondage Fairies, with one of the fairies doing it with a squirrel. Anyone who has ever flipped through BF can attest that it is more silly than anything else..
I mean the squirrel was calling her “Hon” and was very anthropomorphised. If you want to get technical, she wasn’t human either, being a fairy. Calling it bestiality is like saying something involving Splinter from TMNT is bestiality. It may be in bad taste, but calling it bestiality is really stretching that definition I think…
Flipping through the book quickly, between Japanese censorship and choice of panels, I don’t think I saw any real explicitness in the form of organs and such. Certainly topless nudity and people having sex, but generally of the Cinemax r-rated variety.
I’d think some of the violence and/or gore would be more disturbing to people, like some of the samples from horror books.
If anyone is curious for themselves how offensive the book is, it is probably at your local library. Just pick it up and take a look instead of assuming things..
[...] Not wishing to repeat the details here, I direct readers to stories here and commentary here and here. [...]
Shawn, thank you for the info, that is certainly a lot different then what was originally said. I’d have to see it to make my own call. As for assumptions and fact checking, the quote was very direct and from the person defending the book. If I had to factcheck every story I read I’d be doing nothing but.
Greg,
My annoyance at fact-checking thing was aimed more at news organizations, in this case the Library Journal. I really hate how much news these days seems to go straight into “he said, she said” without taking a closer look into things. But my annoyance for that spilled into the assumptions comment and made it stronger than it should have been, so apologies on that. Was less at you particularly and more that I seem to have seen quite a few comments in different blogs over the last couple of days with seemingly no one having actually read the book in question, when it isn’t all that hard to find.
Okay, that’s cool. I completely agree with you there!
The valid issue is freedom of speech and of the press and of the people to peaceably assemble. Everything else about this matter is hogwash.
So a sixteen year old saw some depictions of a sexually explicit nature in a book. So what? By the time I was sixteen my buddies and I had fished explicit porn out of dumpsters near student housing at the University of Kansas, and seen far more than a graphic of a fairy humping a squirrel. I cannot think of a single sixteen year old in my high school who hadn’t figured out some way to see Playboy or Penthouse or Hustler magazines. Naturally we all grew up twisted, indecent, and disgusting. But I’m the only one who openly uses terms like “humping” on a public blog.
Now, the issue of a public library having art appreciation books has utterly nothing to do with freedom of speech. It has to do with whether taxpayers should be funding libraries at all. The alarm at having a library bureau-rat meeting with a politician to learn what the kommissars have decided should be policy and then, gosh, implementing that policy, is all very amusing.
If you want books, go to a bookstore. If you want really odd books, drive into LA to buy books at some of the really odd stores there. Any book, including numerous manga and hentai books can be bought on the Internet from various sources.
But if you want my sympathy because your socialist paradise of taxpayer financed libraries and taxpayer financed schools has resulted in a rigid morality being imposed by brainless bureau-rats and idiotic politicians, excuse me while I don’t cry you a river. It isn’t your library that is being censored, it is the government’s library. Any illusion you have that the socialist system gives you freedom within the government’s buildings or with resources paid for with your tax dollars should be shattered. You ought not to live like a child thinking that the government is a plaything you can manipulate.
And when you consider that the feral government wants to be able to track your library borrowing activities and otherwise monitor your every waking moment, maybe you’ll come to the conclusion that what you really want is quite a bit less from government at all levels.
Okay, now I’ve seen the pictures, and there’s a lot more than just the squirrel pic (which is not what I would have considered anthropomorphised, I was thinking more like Thundercats). And more then just 2%. As for Pjim’s points, there’s a big difference between what teens get into and what gets thrown at them. There is also the issue of simple public civility, and a public institution is going to be held to a higher standard then a private individual. I’m not against a library having the book but it should be no where near anything YA related and preferrably in an adult-only collection.