Notebook: Local Control (Part I)

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

This Is Your Time, a book for children by Ruby Bridges, who at the age of six was the first Black child to desegregate the New Orleans school system, was pulled from school library shelves this year in Katy, Texas. Speaking of the Normal Rockwell image of her on the book’s cover, Ruby Bridges told a House Oversight Committee hearing on school library book bans that she only “learned the full impact of my own story at the age of seventeen when a reporter showed up on my doorstep with the Norman Rockwell painting which depicted my walk. Until that moment, I thought my experience in 1960 was contained to my own neighborhood, in my own community, on my own street. I questioned if it really even mattered at all. But finally, seeing this painting, now I understood my role in history, and it didn't come from the textbooks used to teach me that very same history.”

As the world of publishing and books warily ventures out of the pandemic years, years that from a macro perspective definitely favored online buying and big-box retailing and their attendant enrichment of the already-famous, sensational, and easily digested, but in the micro often gave new energy to local book communities, rallying neighborhoods around their bookstores, fortifying booksellers’ abilities to serve their locales creatively, and giving new technological opportunities to authors; years that still buffet us with supply-chain disruptions and price volatility; and as we venture out of the upheavals of the #MeToo and George Floyd protests that challenged workplaces not only to be more diverse but to be more responsive to the governance demands of a new and newly impatient rising generation of workers; and as the ravenous demand for news both in journalism and nonfiction that characterized the Trump years abates, and the social media giants adjust to new demands for privacy constraints and moderation, and everyone wonders which of the previous trends will reassert themselves, or whether we face new, as yet little understood trends, the most potent issue in the book world has been the mounting pressure to remove books from school libraries and even public libraries and bookstores on content grounds, and the question of what chilling effects such pressures may have on what gets published, acquired, distributed, and even written, and ultimately how this limits what people, especially children, read and learn about the world.