Buncombe library board rejects three book ban requests

According to one community member, Buncombe County readers should put down books with explicit sexual content and consider reading the Bible instead.

That’s what one unidentified resident suggested in multiple submission forms requesting the removal of three books from the county library shelves: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering and Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution by Nona Willis Aronowitz. The requester’s name was redacted from the forms.

Instead, the Library Advisory Board unanimously recommended that Buncombe Library Director Jason Hyatt keep all three selections in the collection at its meeting Sept. 12. The Bible is already stocked in all branches of the Buncombe County Library System.

“The public library is not a religious institution. We keep the Bible on the shelf, but it’s not something we use to dictate or govern our standards in the way that a Christian library would,” said board member Laina Stapleton.

Bad Sex is a first-person account detailing the author’s “journey to sexual satisfaction and romantic happiness, which not only lays bare the triumphs and flaws of contemporary feminism but also shines a light on universal questions of desire,” according to the publisher.

In Perv, Bering weaves together science, politics, psychology and history with his reflections on growing up gay in America to “humanize” so-called deviants while challenging readers to consider the differences between thought and action when it comes to sexual fantasies, according to the publisher.

For the person who submitted the forms, sexual content was reason enough to ban them from the public library.

“I don’t see why a book about sex should be included in a public library,” the person wrote about two of the books, neither of which the objector read in their entirety, according to the forms.

The objector called the third book, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, “complete blasphemy.”

“I was looking for religious books and saw this. … I looked inside out of wonder if someone would really blaspheme [sic] the Bible and saw both full nudity and violence,” the person wrote. “Terrible gateway for children!”

According to the publisher of Genesis, the author decided to “do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James Bible.”

At the public library, anyone can fill out a statement of reconsideration form, found on the library website or at any branch. Once submitted, the Collection Development Team reviews it and makes a recommendation to the Library Advisory Board, which then makes a recommendation to the library director at one of its meetings. The library director makes the final determination and will respond in writing to the original request within eight weeks, according to the policy. If he decides to keep the items in the library collection, those titles will be exempt from reconsideration for three years, Hyatt said.