ACPL and A Child's Life: The Tale of a Challenged Book

I want to be clear, the bulk of this post is copy and pasted from a co-worker, but I think the story will prove useful to our discussions. I'm not considering this post part of my weekly current events posting, but an off-topic way to allow the real storyteller access to comments and a chance to moderate (I can't give her access to our off-topic forum in Oncourse;).

The story below takes place in the past, when Lisa Upchurch was managing the Tecumseh Branch. I worked at Tecumseh for a few years after Lisa had moved on to managing ACPL's Georgetown Branch. I am witness to this story serving as a sort of lore and a spark for pre-opening conversation on Intellectual Freedom in theory and in practice. We hotly debated the merits of the situation many times over.

Let me give the mic to Lisa:

To really have an appreciation of this story, you might want to search Amazon and Google for information on the book A Child's Life by Phoebe Gloeckner.

Ms. Gloeckner is an artist, and has been trained as a medical illustrator. This book is an autobiographical treatment of the author's childhood and teen years, in graphic novel format. The protagonist/author was repeatedly and brutally sexually abused by her mother's boyfriends, one after the other. Little Phoebe was terrified and confused about how she was supposed to react to her life of abuse, and even came to court it since that was the only kind of attention she received.

It's about the most horrific childhood I can imagine, and Ms. Gloeckner uses her artistic talent and training to illustrate her experience very explicitly. There's a 2 page spread which depicts a very small, frightened girl and a very large, naked and erect man. He's about to force her. Everything is from the child's perspective, so the furniture and the man are larger than life. Honestly it's making me a little sick typing this because I'm recalling the illustration. And that's only one of them--the book is packed with this stuff. The author states very clearly in the preface that she created the book so that people would understand just exactly how horrible the life of an abused child is, and what they're condoning by looking the other way.

Ms. Gloeckner had a hard time getting the work published. Nobody wanted to touch it, until one small press recognized what an important work they had on their hands. A number of employees refused to run the presses because it was so upsetting, but enough were willing that the book did make it into print.

I read about this book someplace, I don't remember where. I called our adult bibliographer at the time, and I discussed it with her. We agreed together that our library needed to have this book in our collection, to give these children a voice. Three copies were purchased; two for the main library, and one for my branch. I used to show every new employee the book and explain just how important it was that it always be shelved in the adult collection.

So one day I got a phone call. It seems that a woman who worked for the country prosecutor got her hands on the book, and decided it was child porn. She wanted to have me arrested. She wanted to sue the library. She wanted to make a public case of it. She also called our community relations department before she called me, and so the situation ended up in the director’s lap, without ever following the official materials challenge procedure. I nonetheless produced plenty of documentation to explain that the book was not porn, but was instead a cautionary tale. The associate director backed me. In fact he said that in his opinion anyone who works with children should be forced to read it, so they'd understand just how important it is to report suspected abuse. Bless the man.

But the prosecutor was running for re-election, and he was looking for a platform. The director talked to him, and then decided that the library's collection development policy wasn't going to be it, and so the three copies were marked missing and ended up in [the director’s] office. They've never been seen since. I’ve enquired a number of times over the years, and I’ve always been told they were lost.

I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing the director. If this book had not been removed from the collection, the prosecutor would have used the library, the bibliographer and me as examples on his pyre. Perhaps the director thought that the library board would not be willing or able to protect me and the bibliographer. Perhaps he feared that the book was too hard to defend, and that the damage which would be caused by opening our collection to the scrutiny of a prosecutor on a witch hunt was not worth it. And perhaps he was right.

**Update** Here's the link for Lisa's comment below. From the Wikipedia page below you can link out to Glockner's site with the University of Michigan.

Gloeckner on Wikipedia

Gloeckner's profile on the University of Michigan faculty page. Note the last sentence of the third paragraph on the fate of A Child's Life in California.