For fuck’s sake
Maury County Public Library director Elizabeth Potts with one of the censored boks
In Columbia, Tennessee, one of the patrons of the Maury County Public Library has decided that there’s a problem with modern fiction, and has taken to signing out novels — especially mystery novels — with one particular word in them, blacking out the word, and returning the books.
The word? “It’s the ‘f’ word,” said library director Elizabeth Potts.
According to a story from local News Channel 5, staffers at the library suffering from numerical hesitancy have found “50 to 100 books copy edited, illegally.”
However, “Staff can not locate the offender because federal law protects patrons,” says the report. Exactly what federal law “is tying the hands of the library director” from looking at who signed out a book and fining that person for damaging the book — as they would be able to do if a patron hadn’t returned a book at all — is unclear. The article merely says it’s “a federal library law that protects privacy.” So God knows what they would have done if the same federal government, under the Patriot Act, had demanded to see who signed out what.
Meanwhile, the director has put up a sign, asking whoever it is to stop that shit.
My clinical diagnosis would be that this library patron is literally fucking crazy. Perhaps he/she is a distant relative of mine, since one of my aunts, who was mentally handicapped, used to go through books, with enviable focus and concentration, and fill in all the open spaces in letters with a pencil.
She was particularly fond of letters like o, d, p, which offered ample room for “improvement.” The few books that my grandparents had were rendered unreadable. When she visited us, I had to keep a watchful eye on my own small bookshelf as a kid.
Then again, my aunt was probably less crazy than the library patron, since she would only have filled in the u and c in the word fucking, leaving it quite readable after all.