The Invisible Library

A common feature in the Lovecraftian horror sub-genre is the idea that there is some class of knowledge that Man Was Not Meant to Know. This usually involved some mind bending aspect of the cosmos that turns our psyche inside out if we were to perceive it, or a race of semi-tangible aliens who resemble pineapples with bat wings that turn out to have genetically engineered us as at some distant point in the past because they liked the taste of our brains. This information is invariably located in a book with a tongue twister for a name kept handily on the shelf at Miskatonic University’s Library, albeit in the closed stacks, though pretty much anyone could get it if they just asked for it. A recent poll by the Pew Research Group confirms that a surprisingly large number of people actually think there are books that contain Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, and that they are in our school libraries:

Since 1999, support for the idea of banning “books with dangerous ideas” from public school libraries has declined from 55% to 46% and has now fallen to the lowest level of support of the past 20 years, in contrast with the modest increase observed in concerns about pornographic material in magazines and movies.

The fact that the number of people who would ban books form libraries has fallen to 46% is bothersome.

Hat tip to Emily at Library Revolution.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Books Bound in Human Skin, Library News, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.