(Note: I edited the title of this post in 2020 to clarify the post’s content.)
West, C., & Katz, E. (Eds.). (1972). Revolting librarians. San Francisco: Booklegger Press.
I know I said I had no interest in reviewing books, but I had to make an exception for this one.
Revolting Librarians is a heartfelt manifesto in which librarians from multiple corners of the library world – including universities, public schools, government offices, and unions – urge their colleagues to challenge status quo librarianship and use their libraries as a forum for promoting social change. What makes this work so powerful – aside from its irresistible title – is its stories, told in provocative essays, poems, and pictures. Each page of the book is a scrap in a librarianship collage that was assembled in a bygone flower-child era but that exudes a timeless energy.
The book was published during the late stages of the Vietnam War and in the same year as President Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election victory. The anti-establishment spirit of the 1960s may have been waning, but the revolting librarians were fighting to keep it alive. Their book publication is itself a type of anti-establishment protest. Editors Celeste West and Elizabeth Katz rejected conventional publishing standards by publishing the book themselves, omitting the publication date from the front of the work, setting the text in an office typewriter font, and filling the book with hand-drawn illustrations. Essay titles like “Sex and the Single Cataloger” and “Library School Lunacy” complete the down-with-tradition effect.
Revolting Librarians is a personal, emotional book. Reading each librarian’s words is like listening to an eccentric stranger tell the story of her life in a bar, or like sneaking peeks inside someone’s private diary. This is entirely in keeping with the editors’ goals. As West states in the first paragraph of the book’s introduction:
“It is a riproaring satisfaction to publish outright and upfront what some of us really feel about the library world: how it relates to our personal being – our hopes, conflicts, growth…librarians into changing things need a forum: to talk about what should be totally trashed and what feels good; to wink at sacred old cows and explore our newer dogmas; to find each other” (para. 1).
Many of the topics tackled by the revolting librarians are uncannily relevant to contemporary library discourse. The contributors’ concerns about the uncertain future of libraries – concerns driven by limited funding and nonstop technological change – resonate strongly today. In the book’s penultimate essay, “Notes on a Utopian Information System,” Paul Axel presents his vision of an uber-automated 22nd century world, a vision that was realized in large measure during the 20th century. Also uncanny is the irony of this book having been published in San Francisco. Once a smorgasbord of social classes and lifestyles, the city is now hyper-gentrified, an emblem of the rich-poor divide that the Revolting Librarians were bending over backwards to bridge.
If you want to be inspired by irreverent librarians challenging every aspect of the way library business is done and refusing to be silenced, then this is your book. If you are already surrounded by librarians like that, you may only need to read it once. If you are not, but want to be, read it twice, keep it by your bedside, and pull it out at the end of those down days when you need to be reminded of what is possible and why you became a librarian in the first place.
(This post is a condensed version of a book review I wrote for Dr. James Carmichael’s History of Libraries and Librarianship class in the summer of 2017. I updated the title of the post in 2020 to reflect the subject matter.)
Stacy Torian 