Why you can't find what you want at the library, PART 1

'The Library of Grand Vizier Ragib Pasha' 

engraving in Tableau général 

de l.empire othoman

by Ignatius Mouradgea d.Ohsson

Paris late 1700s

I was at my favorite branch library last week. My inaugural post, my very first post of this blog, was about the Battery Park branch library of the NYPL system.


I gushed about how the literature section was full of not just classics but modern classics, and even newer books, on their way to becoming modern classics, pre-classic I guess.

BANNED BOOK


It’s not enough just to know only Dickens and Conrad and Boccacio, "the Canon," the books agreed on as being the greatest literature, then taught in colleges.

Hamish ed, UK 1951

Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.

Everyone reads them, and then everyone writes about them- think of the tens of thousands of dissertations dissecting the greatest to the smallest of the Canon.

I'm not saying there is something wrong with continuing to mine the classics. I agree, in great works of art, the wealth of things to discover is bottomless. Things the authors put there on purpose and—more often—things they didn’t know they’d put there, just following their instincts.

more interesting than the original? 

And I agree that every new reader brings all their own stuff into the trigonometry of allegory. 


I myself can endlessly hold forth on what a story means, or a book, or the movie they made from the book and how it failed (or didn’t). And enjoy myself thoroughly.


It's just that. . .
. . . Is that all there is? Surely great books have been written in the meantime! How it surprises me to see highschoolers on the subway still reading Catcher in the Rye for English class.