Cruising the Library - by Melissa Adler

I noticed the title of this book while I was looking for something else in our library catalog. (I don't remember what I was originally searching.) The author begins with a discussion of the Library of Congress catalog subject term "Paraphilias" - a word I had never heard of before reading this book, which is exactly her point. Very few people know this word, and even if they could guess its meaning, they probably wouldn't think to search for it in the library catalog even if they had heard of it. Using the word as a subject heading effectively hides the work even as it is available on the open shelves of the library.

(At the time of this posting my own library had six titles listed under the subject heading Paraphilias.)

Through the exploration of this term Adler demonstrates that how we classify books has more to do with librarians determining what is "normal" (rather than simply reflecting it) especially when it comes to sex. Furthermore, the Library of Congress 

disciplines sex and sexuality by privileging scientific domains and text, granting such disciplines authority while obfuscating the humanities, popular literature, and emerging interdisciplinary and local knowledges.

She also demonstrates how whiteness and heterosexuality are presumed "normal" by searching the catalog for specific terms.

Much of this book is an exploration of the now defunct Delta collection of the Library of Congress - a little known collection of erotica, works deemed obscene, or those containing information about "perverse" or "aberrant" sexual practices. The Delta collection was restricted - those wishing to use it had to ask. By putting certain works in the Delta collection librarians had power in determining what was considered obscene or "aberrant". Now long gone, Adler discovered that even finding information about the existence of the Delta collection was hard to come by. An excerpt from her book about the collection was published on Literary Hub (which you can read here).

Those of us who work in libraries are no strangers to the use of the library as sexual space. Many a library worker can tell you a story of coitus interruptus or of finding post-coital evidence while straightening books the stacks. Adler also sees the library itself as a sensual and seductive place

The library is an erotically charged space. Some might even regard the pleasurable experience of browsing and losing and finding oneself in the stacks as an exercise in sadomasochism. The classificatory apparatuses in the library, with their disciplinary divisions and regularizing and shaming techniques, often bar opportunities for cross-disciplinary play, prohibit the intermingling of bodies, and cut the perverse from the normal (as if such an act was actually possible). In the library space, submission to and enactment of technologies of control facilitate and inhibit promiscuousness in browsing, perverse reading, and bodily pleasures.

I am always interested in what people have to say about book banning. Adler quotes President Dwight D. Eisenhower who had this to say about it in 1953

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book. 

Be like Ike.