Obviously, the proprietor of this little bookstore wasn’t one of that pretty large number.
Doesn’t matter at all what the books are about, how well-written they are, whether or not they have pretty pictures, or whether they’d ever be considered for Newbury or Caldecott medals. You have a customer who thinks the books are bad and shouldn’t be read by anyone. The bookstore employee happened to agree.
If a bookstore employee just happened to be the kind of Creationist who does not believe children should be fed that godless blasphemy about Natural Selection and agreed to pull SamSam’s hypothetical kid’s book about Darwin off the shelves when a customer pointed it out, it would be no less and no more objectionable.
That’s why I’m kind of glad my Great Aunt Mildred never worked in a bookstore.
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Is it SOMBODY ELSE deciding what other people should read every time somebody writes a negative review about a product, therefore hoping that in the future better, smarter products will be sold in its place?
Oh come on. She didn’t get the book banned. She just called it to the attention of a staff person who agreed that the book sucked and decided not to have it on the shelf. Pretty damn different for getting a book “banned.”
If this is bad behavior on the consumer’s part, then any action to influence a corporate entity is bad behavior.
I mean really. It’s not like she lobbied her congressperson and tried to get a law passed that said that there can be no titles of books that use the word “boy” or “girl.” She simply said to the employee, “I find this offensive and don’t think you should stock it.” To which the employee said, “I agree. It is offensive. And since choose what to stock, I will take it off the shelf.”
Come on people.
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I’m proud of my kid when she recognises sexist bullshit and assholery. Mind you, she’s seventeen, so I’m proud of her if she bloody well wakes up before 2pm…
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Wait…are you trying to say book stores shouldn’t be free to decide what kind of books they want to stock or not (with or without input from customers)?
CENSORSHIP!
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If I haven’t made it clear already, I myself can not imagine the book that should not be sold to anyone. Maybe I just have a paucity of imagination. ;^) I grew up reading things that most adults probably thought I shouldn’t have had access to. I’m inclined to think the experience was beneficial to me, overall.
Sorry for being all judgey. SamSam’s original point was to remind people not to be hypocritical, and I think that was an important point to make. It’s all very well to go ahead and ban and censor like there’s no tomorrow if you think it’s the right thing to do. I myself do not, even though I find these books to be no less ridiculously awful than anyone does. But standing up for Freedom of Speech puts one in the position of having to defend some fairly awful stuff, often much worse than these books.
Anyway, I think it’s a fascinating moral problem about which I spent a lot of time thinking when I was young, and I do love to discuss it.
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Obviously. Assuming the books stayed off the shelves. Which, I’d hazard a guess, is likely, though not quite a foregone conclusion.
Helicopter-parent tantrum? That’s not what’s described in the link. What led you to imagine that?
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So, is this a good summation of your opinion:
All bookstores must sell all books.
If a bookstore finds out that some of its customers do not like a particular book that the staff of the bookstore also do not like, they must continue to sell it anyway, since they must carry all books ever printed.
If a customer does not like the fact that a bookstore has a particular book that the customer finds offensive, the customer must quietly leave the bookstore. S/he is free to go to another bookstore, but this store must also have all books in it.
And all bookstores must be very damn large in order to not make any choices about what books go on their shelves and instead stock all titles ever published.
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Heh. That’s funny. No, as I said above, bookstore owners and managers decide what to stock. They can listen to customers (or not) all they want. Books will fly off the shelves (or not) depending on what customers want to buy.
But as a customer, I only worry about my own wants. I might ask a bookstore to get a title I want, if they don’t stock it on their shelves. I’d never ask them to remove a title I don’t want. Its presence on the shelf puts me under no obligation whatsoever to buy it. And someone else, the thinking goes, might want it. Who am I to tell them they shouldn’t buy it?
As for Great Aunt Mildred, she’d have pulled many of my favorite books off the shelves. If it were up to her, you wouldn’t get to buy George Carlin’s Brain Droppings any more than you’d get to buy The Descent of Man, The Golden Bough, or anything by Lovecraft, Poe, or Clive Barker.
She was a good baker, but otherwise not exactly the life of the party.
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Nope. That’s criticism, and it would be the preferred method of dealing with undesirable literature. Getting the books pulled off the shelves is utterly different and you know it.
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Let’s get something clear here. This is not censorship.
An 8 year old does not have the power or authority to censor anything. Governments can censor. School districts can censor. Churches can censor. In order for there to be censorship there needs to be authority and the power to deny access.
All this girl did was complain to a clerk that she didn’t like something and maybe ask that it be removed (not clear).
Now, this is not the kind of behavior I would encourage from my child. Were I in this situation, I would first point out that these books are little trinkets designed solely to make a couple bucks off parents too distracted to recognize the books as trash. (Really, It’s like getting upset about the $1.00 crossword puzzle books at the checkout line.)
I would also use an experience like this to teach her that her life will be full of things that she will and won’t like, and that it is important to pursue all that things that she thinks have value and are worthwhile and discard the things that have no meaning to her.
Finally, I would emphasize to her that while she may find the book “for girls” of no use, that the next child who came in the store might flip through that same book and be very excited about the content, and that the values and interests of that child, whether it is a boy or girl should not be mocked, criticized or in any other way demeaned.
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Wait, I thought censorship was a Bad thing. I guess the Banned Books list just gets longer. This is not something to be proud of.
Or you can just buy her the boy book. Boom! Problem solved.
I agree that the two scenarios are roughly equally censorship or not-censorship. I’m on the non-censorship side, because of the whole “private bookstore” thing that many have pointed out. But where they fall on the censorship scale is just one aspect of the comparison. If you hold, as I think most people do, that bookstores are better or worse depending in part on whether they stock good or bad books, then it’s better that they remove bad books than good. So your scenario is only the same if the book about Darwin is as bad as these books.
But I think my analogy is closer to what happened in this case than yours. The little girl criticized the book, and it’s use of valuable shelf space, the store decided not to utilize said shelf space, and the mom wrote a critical blog post about it
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At the same time, the bookstore should pull, like, all the magazines? I mean, have you looked at Woman’s World, Seventeen, Men’s Journal, Details…? Lots of gender stereotyping.
Interesting that this happened at Half Price. The only copy of The Turner Diaries that I’ve ever seen was at the Guadalupe St. store in Austin. They had it behind the counter, up on a display shelf, where they placed old, rare, or otherwise interesting books. I don’t think they were pushing the book nor its contents, but maybe pointing out “look, someone here in Austin was reading this…”
Phew, getting pretty rank in here. So. much. mansplaining.
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