A surprising library

[mtbc]

I had previously mentioned our city library system's openly shelved books being but the tip of the iceberg compared with the stacks, the science fiction sections being small indeed when judged against some branches from other Scottish library systems.

I had a further surprise in visiting our modern art gallery. Not only is there a decent library branch in its basement but many of the books borne by its small science fiction section are the same as in some other branches, including my nearest. This isn't a surprise for classics, like The Forever War, but was more of a surprise for, frankly, books that have rather less reason to be commonly shelved. For instance, the system lists a whole eighteen copies of Humans, Bow Down, which isn't exactly the kind of book to leave one thinking about it for months afterward.

To put those eighteen copies into perspective, consider examples of books that I would expect large library systems to carry. Fairly randomly: for Stephen King's The Stand we seem to have no borrowable copies at all, and for Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose there is but one (currently on loan).

Initially, I had wondered if they have a broad selection and just choose oddly and uniformly what to shelve but, the more I probe, the more it seems that what they choose to buy and hold is not in the proportions that I might have guessed.

Comments

[shadowkat]

Is Humans, Bow Down by a Scottish or English author? Because that may be the reason - they are primarily choosing native authors? I've seen small American libraries do that.

[mtbc]

James Patterson so, in this case, maybe because he's such a well-known author. We do get good representation of locals, though, like Iain Banks and Ian Rankin.

[shadowkat]

James Patterson? Ugh. He doesn't even write his books - he outlines and hires other people to do the writing. It's literally paint-by-number. That's just...depressing.

I think people love him because you can fall asleep reading his stories and still figure out what is happening when you wake up two chapters later.

[mtbc]

That would indeed fit with this example!