“In large buildings with multiple rooms and lots of people, you need to have some feeling among the staff, as well as the public, that it’s a secure place, particularly where it’s used a lot by children,” said library-district director Harry Courtright, who retired Friday.
[...]
In his 12 years with the district, Courtright said there have been no incidents of a guard drawing a gun.

“And they shouldn’t have to, because they have the training. But that gun makes a difference to the people who are coming in the building who might want to do something that could be bad; they see an armed guard, and the reality is they back off and they don’t do things – it’s a preventative thing,” he said.

Right! Which is why all large libraries in big cities have armed private guards in them. Right, Phoenix libraries?

Interviews with officials at city-run libraries in the Valley that don’t belong to the county district indicate that armed guards are uncommon.

In Mesa, library-security guards are unarmed. The topic of arming them has never come up, said city spokeswoman Lily King-Cisneros.

“If there is a problem, they call the police,” she said.

Chandler’s libraries have a simple behavior policy to follow up on negative behavior, Manager Brenda Brown said.

Chandler employs security guards sparingly: Park rangers help during high-traffic times at the Downtown Library, while at Hamilton and Basha branches, both located on school campuses, security guards are present for a few hours following schools’ closing times. None is armed.

“Most of our behavior issues take place downtown, and police are less than a block away. We call them quite often and quite frequently,” Brown said, adding that stolen bikes are a common problem but threats to librarians are rare.

Phoenix, which has 16 libraries, trains its own guards, who are city employees and unarmed.

Incidents are rare even at the Burton Barr Central Library, where the surrounding neighborhood has a high number of homeless people, said Lupita Barron-Rios, acting deputy director for public services.

“For the most part, we don’t have a lot of incidents that require calling the police,” Barron-Rios said.

Barron-Rios said police are called when a patron’s car or bicycle is stolen.

Of course, none of these minor behavioral issues and occasional thefts would happen at all if literally every person in that library, from the children to the librarians to the homeless people, was carrying a clearly displayed handgun. It’s just a fact.

Is this armed guard program controversial? It wasn’t, until one library made a fuss.

Doesn’t Southwest Regional Library in Gilbert, Ariz., look like a lovely place? Looks can be deceiving! This library is suffering from a rash of “hostile encounters with irate patrons over late fees and other issues,” which is why the town decided to reinstate the guards they let go for funding reasons last year. But! “Town officials contend that the library district never told them of the plans to arm the guards once funding was restored …” I feel like town officials should’ve understood that they’re dealing with Maricopa County, here. There were going to be guns involved, no matter what.

[Via Michel Marizco]

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own “branches,” although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn’t listed.

The pseudonymous Dr. Beachcomber would like to expand the Invisible Library to include fake books — that is, titles that don’t even exist in a fictional universe. They appear only on the spines of sham bookshelves used to disguise secret doors in exceptionally interesting houses. Charles Dickens had just such a door installed in his own study in London, with fake titles of his own devising, including “Socrates on Wedlock.”

Most such titles are jokes (“Cat’s Lives” in nine volumes, etc.), but then so are many of the celebrated holdings in the Invisible Library proper; if there’s one thing authors relish, it’s a chance to make fun of other authors. Hence, such immortal imaginary works as “Only a Factory Girl,” by Rosie M. Banks, a popular sentimental love story that often crops up in the fiction of P.G. Wodehouse; “The Industrious Muse: Narrativity and Contradiction in the Industrial Novel,” by Robin Penrose, in David Lodge’s academic satire, “Nice Work;” and “My Big Ol’ Feets Gon’ Stomp Dat Evil Down” by Isshee Ayam from Trey Ellis’ send-up of 1980 multiculturalism, “Platitudes.”

Who’d want to slog through those — let alone tackle another of Dickens’ japes, “History of a Short Chancery Suit” in 21 volumes? The vast majority of the Invisible Library is, let’s face it, better off not existing. The world does not need “Feeling GREAT,” by Ashley Tralpis, M.D., Ph.D. (from Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections”). And if a reader learns anything from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, it’s to stay well away from the “Necronomicon” of Abdul Alhazred, perhaps the most famous — and certainly the most infamous — imaginary book of all time.

Which raises an intriguing question: If allowed to choose only one, which volume in the Invisible Library would you most want to read?

Assuming that “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” counts as an imaginary book (seeing as it’s also a real book, by Douglas Adams), then it would surely have the longest list of patrons waiting to check it out at the Invisible Library’s front desk. Fans of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño might opt for a masterpiece by Benno von Archimboldi, whose works captivate the characters in “2666.” Others would surely select something from the extensive imaginary works invented by Jorge Luis Borges — “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Ts’ui Pên, perhaps?

For myself, the choice is easy. I’d take “The Higher Common Sense” by the Abbé Fausse-Maigre, the indispensable philosophical handbook of Flora Poste, heroine of Stella Gibbons’ great comic novel, “Cold Comfort Farm” (1932). Flora, an admirer of Jane Austen, goes to live with the Starkadders, relations in the Sussex countryside, and finds herself plunged into a doom-laden agricultural milieu familiar to readers of the rural gothics popular at the time, overwrought “earthy” novels written in imitation of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Armed with the insights of the Abbé (I like to think of him as a more avuncular version of Montaigne), Flora tidies up the seemingly intractable messes at Cold Comfort Farm, from dispatching the hellfire-and-brimstone paterfamilias on a missionary road trip to shipping her oversexed cousin Seth off to Hollywood and imparting romantic and contraceptive advice to the local girls. At every turn, “The Higher Common Sense” provides her with a sound footing to tackle any challenge, including the most formidable of all — Aunt Ada Doom, who refuses to leave her room on account of the shock she incurred as a girl upon witnessing “something nasty in the woodshed.”

In times of trial and confusion, one can’t help but long for a copy of this invaluable imaginary volume. Readers who’d make a different choice if offered a single checkout from the Invisible Library are invited to leave their thoughts in the comments thread.

Further reading

Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog’s extensive postings on imaginary books and invisible libraries

The Invisible Library blog by Ed Park and Levi Stahl

Poets & Writers magazine on the Invisible Library exhibition at Tenderpixel Gallery in London in 2009

The Malibu Lake Branch of the Invisible Library, with links to other branches

A little background: The 2000 Children’s Internet Protection Act requires libraries receiving federal assistance to filter out obscenity, child pornography and material that is harmful to minors, but — this is key, so take note — it also requires librarians to abide by adults’ requests for the filtering software to be turned off to “enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purpose”). The American Library Association, with the help of the ACLU, challenged the law, arguing that it violated First Amendment rights — but the Supreme Court ultimately decided that it did not, since adults could ask to have sites unblocked. But what the case didn’t definitively answer was whether adults should be allowed to watch hardcore porn in the library — and so here we are.

While the ALA has unsurprisingly fallen on the anti-filtering side of this debate, and librarians in general are especially attuned to threats of censorship, there is by no means a consensus on the answer to this question. Christian Zabriskie, the founder of the advocacy group Urban Librarians Unite, told me, “I personally think that this is a poor decision on the part of these libraries that are going this route. While they may be protecting the First Amendment rights of some patrons [the ones looking at porn], they are ignoring the rights of other patrons,” say, the right to bring your children to the library without concern that they will be exposed to porn while they are working on a term paper. Some libraries have addressed this concern with privacy screens or by moving computers to less-trafficked areas.

Shannon McNeill, a librarian outside Pittsburgh, supports filtering but said, “Libraries are pretty liberal with the filters and there really does need to be a line drawn with what is appropriate for the sake of children and other people using the library.” Complicating things is that “there are a lot of different ways to get around it,” she said, citing the men she’s seen using library computers to watch sexy workout videos.

Jessamyn West, a librarian and a moderator on MetaFilter, wrote in an email, “My personal perspective is that our role is to provide people with access to information that they can use for whatever purpose they want, whether that’s to become a better citizen, do homework, or just for entertainment.” She added: “I think the U.S. is a little hung up on sexuality and policing other people’s sexual expression.” She also pointed out in a MetaFilter thread on the subject that it’s questionable whether seeing two people having sex is any more traumatizing to a child than the nonsexual graphic images easily accessible online (and off, for that matter) — like photos of the carnage of war.

While librarians differ on how porn-viewing patrons should be dealt with, many are in agreement that the issue has been blown out of proportion by the media. McNeill says that at her library they have to ask someone “to please ‘not look at questionable material’ at least once a month.” The last person she had to confront was a man in his early 20s who was taking pictures of Internet porn with his cellphone. Similarly, Zabriskie said, “In more than a dozen years as a public librarian I have thrown probably about five guys out of the library for watching porn.” He continued: “This ‘porn in the library’ thing is being made out to be an epidemic. It is not. The epidemic is the loss of libraries, staff and collections in our new budget realities.”

“Of all places, they’re one of the places that needs free public libraries the most,” said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association.

The city consistently ranks as one of the nation’s most impoverished. It’s a place where most families don’t own computers, where just one big bookstore serves the local colleges and where some of the public schools don’t even have librarians.

Camden Free Public Library is a major hub for many residents and draws 150,000 visits a year.

It’s a place to get online to do research, type papers, apply for jobs and check Facebook. Homeless people stop by for respite from the weather and to read. Children listen to stories, do crafts and play board games.

“If you close the library, what are the kids going to do?” asked Frank Lee, a hospital security guard who plays chess at the library’s main branch nearly daily and teaches youngsters the game. “What are they going to do?”

The problem is money.

The city has a permanent financial crisis. Even when times are good, it relies heavily on the state government for support.

But the state also is in crisis. This year, Gov. Chris Christie filled an $11 billion budget deficit, largely by making cuts. Cities, schools, libraries and just about everything else are getting less from the state.

The effects are especially acute in Camden, which now has to compete with more cities for a smaller pool of special aid.

Camden Mayor Dana Redd has asked all departments in the city to cut costs by nearly one-fourth. Even police and firefighters are bracing for layoffs, though none has been announced yet.

The library received $935,000 from the city and $88,000 from the state last year.

This year, the library asked the city for $823,000 and considered the 12 percent reduction a way to share in the sacrifice, interim library director Jerome Szpila said.

But the mayor offered only $281,666 — nearly a 70 percent cut. It was too little to qualify for any state assistance, library board member and activist Frank Fulbrook said.

City Hall was closed Friday because it was a furlough day for most city workers, and Redd did not return messages left with two of her top aides.

The only thing the library could do was close, Fulbrook said. The plan, approved by the library board on Thursday, is to shutter one branch next month, then another in October and the system entirely on Dec. 31.

Twenty-one employees would lose their jobs.

Szpila already is starting to work on plans for what to do with the 187,000 books and artifacts the library has acquired since it opened in 1904 with a $100,000 gift from Andrew Carnegie. They would have to be sold, donated or destroyed, he said.

In the meantime, state and national library associations are trying to come up with ways to save the library. And activists are considering where to go to ask for donations big enough to save the system.

The first goal is to try to get the city council to offer up more funding, Fulbrook said. A little over $100,000 more from the city would be enough to qualify for about $40,000 in state aid, available only if there’s a minimum level of local support.

That amount should be enough to keep one branch operating, Fulbrook said.

No one could keep their voices at a whisper at the library’s main branch on Friday.

Essence Paige, 24, said she stops by the library three or four times a week as she works on her GED. She uses the computers for research and word processing and the reference librarians for all sorts of help, including guiding her to books to assist her with math.

She said she has no idea where she’d get those answers without the library.

Thirty-four-year-old Curtis Williams, who works odd jobs when he can find them and reads at the library when he can’t, was sitting at a table with a half-dozen novels.

He remembers eight years ago when the state put $175 million into Camden, much of it to build up the city’s hospitals and universities, in an effort to attract private investment.

“You give a city $175 million and they don’t even try to save some money for things like this,” he lamented. “When it comes down to it — money or helping the community — it comes down to money every time.”

Children’s librarian Robin Guenther runs a summer reading program and always has games and crafts available, making the library the rare free spot where kids can be entertained.

On Friday, 4-year-old David Council, a library regular, gave Guenther a picture he’d made from materials in her craft box. And 5-year-old Jenessa Guzman was listening as her mother read to her from a Highlights magazine.

If the library does close, Guenther said she’ll do anything she can to save her department — maybe by moving with its collection to a community center.

“If I had a room to sit and open up a library, I would,” she said.