Six books by children's author Dr. Seuss recently discontinued from print due to racist images will be placed under review by Guelph Public Library.
“The publisher has decided not to publish them, so they haven’t necessarily been banned, just a decision by the publisher to stop publishing them,” noted Steve Kraft, CEO of Guelph Public Library.
The six books recently discontinued are: If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, On Beyond Zebra, The Cat’s Quizzer and Scrambled Eggs Super!
The Kitchener Public Library has removed the six books in question from shelves while they are under review.
“We are following the same pattern as most libraries across Canada and our neighbours as well,” said Kraft. “We are going to review them, so we haven’t taken them off the shelf yet. It’s just part of a normal process whenever controversial material comes to our attention.”
After review the library will look at its options for the books, which could include relocating them to a different section of the library.
“Say, for example you could put it in the adult collection or add it to a special reference collection,” said Kraft. “People do want to look at this material for research purposes or educational purposes.”
Kraft said he couldn’t think of other titles off the top of his head which were reclassified in the same way.
“Nothing that readily comes to mind, anyway,” he said.
Kraft noted he recently saw that a movie from 1956 was playing on TV, The Searchers starring John Wayne.
“Which has depictions of Indigenous people that are not true, but they publish a disclaimer,” said Kraft. “They don’t want to pull the material from the public eye because that would indicate in some instances that racism does not exist, when in fact it does. You want the material somehow at hand or to be able to reference it and make your own decisions of how times have changed.”
Kraft said he doesn’t think a disclaimer label is the solution for books at the Guelph Public Library.
“I don’t think that is necessarily appropriate, because then you would be labelling many books with controversial content for various reason. In my opinion that isn’t a practical approach to these things,” he said.
—with files from The Canadian Press
