Rob Lopresti writes “In James Randi’s latest commentary he includes a letter from Annette Paulsen who was upset by a book offered for sale at the fund raiser for her kid’s school library:
“Imagine my surprise when I saw this book on the shelf: “The Kids Guide to Fortune Telling” by Louise Dickson. I picked the book up and was shocked to see that it was presented as a nonfiction teaching tool. Now, understand that if this book was called “The Kids Guide to Fortune Telling for Fun,” I would not have had a problem with it. I’m all for fun and games. I asked the Librarian if she thought that this was an appropriate book for children, thinking that perhaps she had not really looked at the book. Of course, she looked at me as if I had two heads. She stated that she hadn’t really looked at it and asked if I also had a problem with Harry Potter? I told her, “Of course not. Harry Potter is a novel and clearly identified as such, and everyone knows that it is fiction. But when a book is categorized as nonfiction, and we all know that fortune telling is not real, I think we have an obligation to the children of our school to remove it from the shelves, until it is categorized appropriately, as fiction…””
Fiction indeed…
Yes, we’ll just put it in the fiction section, right next to the Bibles. . .
LC and Dewey 🙂
It might be brought up to patrons that start in on that crap that these books are classified by Dewey and LC as non-fiction. Oh wait, I guess that means that thousands of librarians and catalogers are wrong, and this one person is right! Perhaps another example of “fiction as nonfiction” could be to point out the Greek mythology books – no one puts them in fiction, but they aren’t necessarily real either.
Re:LC and Dewey
I run into that at work often. People come in looking for, say, “Hamlet” or some other Shakespeare play, and they’re often startled when I take them to the nonfiction section. It helps when I explain that “literature” is classified as nonfiction.
On the other hand …
… a patron recently asked a co-worker of mine why the Left Behind series isn’t in nonfiction.
Re:On the other hand …
Probably the same guy who asked me to put “The Da Vinky Code” on hold.
Re:LC and Dewey
While I’m not well-versed in cataloging, isn’t it technically wrong to say that a Dewey number confers “nonfiction” status. Every book in the library has a Dewey number, regardless of whether it’s placed in a pull-out fiction section or the Dewey-numbered section. “Literature” has a Dewey number, but it’s not non-fiction. Mythology is shelved in non-fiction, but most people understand that it’s not true stuff (most people–I have had evidence to the contrary). One would hope that readers would approach any collection or individual book with a caveat emptor mindset. But, we all know that’s not always or often the case.