Uneasy in the Library Stacks
by Jeet Heer
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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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?
