I just applied for a Library of Congress number…
Every time I do a book, I apply for a Library of Congress number. It’s simple — there’s a handy website and the turnaround is usually a few weeks. But this time — I feel a bit uneasy. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden’s sudden firing, and the White House’s efforts to install their own people to muck around over at the Library, have me wondering if some AI program will figure out that my new book just might be the sort of thing they’d rather not include in their collection! Of course, by law, the Library of Congress must accept every book. But, is the White House going to follow the law? Especially, since I have included this rather sharply-worded passage, in the new book, which is entitled You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read This Book? Our Hundred-Year Children’s-Literature Revolution and How We’ll Keep Fighting to Support Our Families’ Right to Read:
This month, as I write—May 2025—the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, has been fired by the president. One of her offenses, according to the White House, was, “putting inappropriate books in the Library for children.” However, by law, every copyrighted book must be collected by the Library of Congress: from Sambo to Tango. The absurdity of this throwaway explanation for firing the first Black female Librarian of Congress—in the ninth year of her congressionally approved ten-year term—shows that the moral-panic rationale for book-banning is a thinly veiled excuse for racist bullying as a form of popular entertainment, playing to the base: a minstrel tiger prancing in stolen clothes.
In 2018, Roger Sutton, editor of The Horn Book Magazine, interviewed Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. They’d both studied library science under Zena Sutherland in 1980’s Chicago. Back then, I reviewed children’s books alongside Roger Sutton on Chicago Public Radio, and Carla Hayden brought me into her library at the Museum of Science and Industry to run a science bookfair as part of her community-outreach campaign.
Carla Hayden: Remember when the motto was: Let the books battle it out on the shelves? We had something to offend everyone, and we were proud of that. Yes, we’ll put them right there. You decide. That’s almost a creed.
Roger Sutton: Libraries present people with the world, basically. All kinds of crazy ideas and smart ideas and ideas I agree with and ideas I loathe.
Carla Hayden: Ideas that worked and didn’t work. Ideas from a long time ago, new ideas, all of that. And you get to decide. You get to pick. Think of the freedom that gives you, that you can pick what you want to read. That’s the essence of the whole thing.
