Uneasy in the Library Stacks
by Jeet Heer
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
In the not so distant past, libraries weren’t such great places to go to if you wanted to read comics. Typically a library would have the Smithsonian comics volumes, a few New Yorker albums, and odd volumes reprinting a few years of the better known strips. The situation is changing rapidly now, largely thanks to increased academic attention on comics. More and more in academic and public libraries, its common to see on the shelves the mainstays of the comics canon. But the integration of comics into the library hasn’t been a smooth process and there are still problems, notably the inability of librarians to figure out where exactly graphic novels should be shelved. Does Maus belong with the other comics, for example, or in modern literature or in European history?
Over at Publishers Weekly, Karen Green – a librarian at Columbia University – has a thoughtful essay on this problem. She notes:
As a result, there is a certain logic to classifying Jim Ottaviani’s Niels Bohr graphic novel, Suspended in language, in QC16 (Science > Physics > General) and Josh Neufeld’s Katrina memoir, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, in F379 (History of the Americas > United States local history > Gulf States > Louisiana.) It is comforting to a librarian to think that patrons browsing in African-American biography will find Ho Che Anderson’s graphic biography of Martin Luther King, King: A Comic Book Biography (E185.97.K5 A547). In fact, the vast array of comic book biographies may be found in their subject classifications. But Seven Miles a Second, the posthumous graphic autobiography of David Wojnarowicz, is in the PN6700s.
Even within a given classification area there is little consistency. Josh Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli have created two volumes of the graphic novel Unknown Soldier, but volume one is classed at PN6728.U5 D97 and volume two is PN6727.D97 U553. Not only do they differ in their primary classification (PN6727 vs. PN6728), but one privileges the title over the author, and the other, the reverse. They are about twelve feet apart on our library shelves.
On an academic list-serv Green offered other evidence:
Another example I discovered yesterday, more egregious even than the Unknown Soldier example in my article, is the Fantagraphics Popeye series:
volume 1 = P96.P65 S45 2006g
volume 2 = PN6728.T5 S386 2006g
volume 3 = PN6728.P6 S44 2008gThere is just no discernible logic to that–especially since there is a series trace in some (but not all) of the records.
All of this is a minor but persistent irritant, especially annoying of libraries are your major research source. It might be worth asking what are the larger roots of this problem. Part of the issue is that some comics publishers don’t send their books to the Library of Congress, so they get classified in an ad hoc basis from library to library. A deeper problem might be that the scholarly community, indeed the world at large, still doesn’t know what to do with comics or how to place them in a larger context. Lacking an overview or consensus, books get shuffled off to different shelves willy-nilly. In any case, Green’s article is very interesting and worth a read.
Labels: Karen Green, Libraries
The Cambridge Public Library has an exceptional collection, but they have this very issue with shelving. There are two graphic novel sections: one in a teen room and another section in the main stacks in a room with science-fiction and mystery books. Some more “important” works are in with the main stacks as well. Had a friend of mine not taken me into the teen room, I would not have known about the books in there. These are heavy on anime and superheros, but I have found graphic novels with “adult” content in there, ironically because I think some librarians are judging content by covers.
I also can see why some would view a special graphic novel section as a form of ghettoizing the graphic novel (as Chris Ware alluded to on the cover of the JIMMY CORRIGAN paperback). My main problem with the Cambridge Library system is that the graphic novels are shelved by title, not by author. I don’t see the logic of separating works by the same author within a special section. It doesn’t make for good browsing.
To some extent as long as patrons can find what they are looking for, it shouldn’t matter (If I need to check out MAUS, should it matter if it is with the Holocaust, biography, graphic novels or some other category as long as I can walk out with a copy?) The larger, more important problem is that the library is not functioning as an archive if it cannot find a way to deal with these works and how they fit within their collections.
this kind of thing boggles my mind every day. I’ve spent the last 10 years working in comic book stores, now my main job is working for the Hennepin county library here in Minneapolis. I’d like to think I know a thing or two about the right way organize comics. and the library’s approach isn’t it. we do have the aforementioned library of congress numbers classification but that’s the old system and it’s on the way out, what we have coming in in it’s place is an even worse problem. over time almost all the comics collections are been being re classified and organized by writer’s last name, why writer? I don’t know maybe it’s because it’s the first one listed. my theory is it’s a tragic consequence of someone thinking,
” if comics are literature, and we shelve our fiction by author’s last name, then we should do the same thing with comics”.
so our county libraries each have have a “graphic novels” section and a a “teen graphic novels section” teen is where your JLA and ultimate spider man and mainstream comics trade paper backs live along with most manga. the graphic novels section is where Black Hole, Maus,Wilson and Jimmy Corrigan and so on live, all shelved under Burns, Spiegelman, Clowes and Ware. weirdly this is also where most comic strip collections go, Calvin and Hobbes and Popeye and but also strangely some random manga series have been decided should be in graphic novels. Dr.Slump, From Eroica with Love, and inuyasha apparently are not fit for teens. it would totally make sense if they could better curate their graphic novels section to organize it by last name. with the “teen comics” collections it’s a disaster. the big problem is organizing these comics by author’s last name, some GI Joe trade paperbacks are in H under” Hama” some in B for “Barr” Batman and Spider-man and X-Men collections as you can imagine are all over the place. it’s a nightmare to shelve and it’s a pain in the ass when a kid wants some Hulk comics that you have to tell him look under “Jones” or maybe “David” it’s laughable when a showcase presents batman collection has strangely been labeled “comics” as if these uncredited silver age comics were actually written by someone with the lase name “comics”.
NYPL shelves D&Q’s Nancy collections in Non-Fiction according to their online catalog.
part of the problem is in wording and categorizing. in most libraries the fiction sections are alphabetical by author’s last name, everything else in a library is shoveled into the category of “non fiction” and thus organized by the library of congress call numbers system. a somewhat arbitrary system was intended to classify all books not just non fiction. the PN classification is the one assigned to Literature (here is a handy guide http://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_p.pdf). as library use changed and many libraries found half of their collection being fiction books it didn’t make sense for half the library to be shelves labeled PN. so they just started having a fiction section then came the sci fi section,mystery, and romance sections. at our libraries poetry, and art books and short story collections still live with the history,science and auto mechanics books in the supposed non fiction shelves.
PN6700-PN6790 is the classification for “comic strips,books,ect.” so in a way it’s like comics got left behind when literature was given it’s own kingdom. in most libraries, only now is it being reclaimed and library administrators just haven’t quite figured out what to do with it.
If the writer and artist are co-authors, as they are (or should be) in comics, then I see no reason for the writer to automatically be the ‘primary’ author. Whoever has the earlier alphabetical ranking should be listed first.
[…] Item: Jeet Heer on Seth’s Stuart MacLean book designs and on comics in libraries. […]
Karen Green’s essay is excellent! Thanks for pointing it out, Jeet!
Comics fans should take a little comfort, though, from the knowledge that they are not alone with this problem. It’s devilishly hard for a library to satisfy any fanbase that hopes to have all their favorite works shelved together, or even in a predictable way. Witness a typical reference desk conversation: “I’d like to find all the stuff on statistics!” “Sure, would you like statistics as a topic in mathematics, stats for business, stats for nurses, novels about statisticians, movies about statistics, graphic novels about statistics, periodicals about statistics, etc. etc. etc.”