Library Fines
Every day I read the daily briefings from the New York Times (6am), Washington Post (1pm) and the Financial Times (in the wee hours). I subscribe yo the Wall Street Journal, but they don’t send me a daily briefing (I’ll have to look into that). I see articles from them all and more including USA Today, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and others through Apple News summary all day long on my phone. I will suggest that I am better informed and more tuned into current events than ever before thanks to digital delivery mechanisms like email, text and Apple News. It’s probably more expensive to cover all those fees, but I think it’s very efficient and worthwhile. You might think I don’t need to watch 3-6 hours of cable news (mostly MSNBC), but I do thanks mostly to Mr. Donald J. Trump.
Today, the New York Times briefing email threw an article at me that caught my interest. It seems the New York Public Library, that bastion of learning that iconically stands between Patience and Fortitude, the granite lions that stand guard at the front door on Fifth Avenue, keeps a list of most checked-out books. In this case, the list is the books that have been most checked-out over the library’s 125-year history. That’s amazing data that I’m glad they have bothered to capture. It’s probably easy to retain and collect that data today with the computerized Dewey Decimal System, but can you imagine the work involved in keeping and collating that information in 1900?
I don’t pretend to understand all the details of how reflective the NYC Public Library use is as a broader indicator of general reading trends of all forms in which people use to obtain their information. Between purchased books and online reading ranging from e-books to audio books to condensed or regurgitated forms of popular books. It might even be valid to ask if books are even relevant anymore since many people get their information in smaller packets like on podcasts and such. That all confuses me too much to explore and I suspect that general information consumption is not necessarily the same as reading a book. There is a more holistic aspect to reading a book. And taking a book out of a library takes enough specific and concerted effort to make for a more meaningful level of genuine interest than interacting with online click-bait. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like it as an indicator. It is certainly income-blind, and the very nature of a public library suggests that it is more representative of the fulsome national interest in a topic or story.
Here is the list:
1. “The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
2. “The Cat in the Hat,” by Dr. Seuss (1957)
3. “1984,” by George Orwell (1949)
4. “Where The Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak (1963)
5. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee (1960)
6. “Charlotte’s Web,” by E.B. White (1952)
7. “Fahrenheit 451,” by Ray Bradbury (1953)
8. “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie (1936)
9. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” by J.K. Rowling (1997)
10. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” by Eric Carle (1969)
Of these, four are children’s picture books, including three of the top four. Two more are also more for children than adults (“Charlotte’s Web” and Harry Potter). Harry Potter is noteworthy for having forty-five years less of check-out history than “Charlotte’s Web”. In fact, the next closest book release is twenty-eight years,which means Harry and J.K. will likely be dominating this list with its seven volumes of Hogwarts sorcery in a few more years. Before that popular literary tsunami, we have the ability to see some important trends in this list.
To begin with, both “1984” and “Fahrenheit 451” (and notably not Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”) are dystopian views of our future written during the worst moments of the ravages of a fascist world gone mad leading into a Cold War communist world gone just as mad, but in a different authoritarian way.. I would love to see the underlying library data that would show how those SciFi works’ check-out trends have ebbed and flowed over the past seventy or eighty years that those books have been on the shelf.
That leaves two interesting mid-list books that are more adult books (though kids are reading these things younger and younger). Number eight on the list is that ubiquitous Dale Carnegie self-help book on winning friends and influencing people. That may be the only book on this list that surprises me in being so highly read over so many years. I have never been a self-help book or motivational speaker sort of guy. I sense that it’s all about self-confidence. Luckily, my mother endowed me with enough self-confidence that I was able to build a strong self-image and an ability to avoid such titles. Even in sports and hobbies, I have never felt inclined to take lessons, but rather let friends teach me and practice to hone the skills rather than book-learning or instruction. Never took a ski or golf lesson and never went to a motorcycle riding school. I’m sure my avoidance can be debated as to whether I have sub-optimized my learning cycle (pun intended).
The one work of adult fiction on the list is Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the book that gets often characterized as the greatest American novel. As with “Catcher in the Rye”, the mysterious circumstances and story of the author as well as the solitary noteworthy literary achievement aspect (Salinger wrote plenty of stories, but only one real novel, and a relatively short one at 73,404 words), make this “Novel of the Century” worthy of checking-out. Given the racially-charged nature of the book’s central theme, one can rightly asked if a New York City Library is the best gauge of sentiment. But then, this is a story set in the rural south, so you can go both ways on that quandary. The question has been answered by a PBS poll, which verifies that “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the nation’s favorite novel. That gives me confidence in saying that this New York City Public Library list is a great guide to the soul of the nation. Now if we had data on the level of fines paid on all books we would have really valuable information.