WaPo reporter Lisa Rein checks out the systematic culling of Virginia library shelves, as Fairfax County librarians use new software to see which books haven’t been checked out in the last two years so they can get rid of them. The Post headline—”Hello, Grisham—So Long, Hemingway?”—is a tad alarmist; although Hemingway does turn up on the deadwood list at one library (along with Faulker, Hardy, Kerouac, and Pasternak), librarians say they will still exercise some discretion in removing books from the shelves.
Or maybe it isn’t so alarmist: After all, at one branch, which sheds about 700 titles a month, Voltaire gets tossed out while “an obscure Edgar Allan Poe volume called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket might be transferred to another branch.” Obscure? Oh, that it has come to this. At least they’re holding on to their copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ Broke Heart Blues, so things haven’t degenerated into complete savagery just yet, I suppose…