Friday Five: Famous Librarians

People like to start singing "Marian the Librarian" when I announce my future career.  Let me rephrase that.  Musical nerds like to start singing "Marian the Librarian" when I announce my future career.  That got me thinking: is this fake librarian the only one people think of? No, some of them also think of Giles from Buffy, but those people are usually in library school because as I said before, librarians are freaking nuts about that slayer. 

So I did a little investigating to find some other librarians people either should know about or are already familiar with and just don't know it yet. 

Five Famous Librarians

1) Benjamin Franklin

Yes, the man you once depicted in a play, probably while holding a kite and a key, was once a librarian.  Yes, that same man who said the turkey should be America's representative and not an eagle.  He founded the first American public library in Philadelphia called the Library Company of Philadelphia.  He acted as a librarian for a few months in its beginnings.  I once fought someone over this.  He claimed it was Thomas Jefferson.  I won.  Other fun little trivia facts: Franklin was on the first national U.S. five cent postage stamp, was the first Postmaster General, started the first fire department, and invented a whole mess of stuff.

2) Nancy Pearl

You may have seen her before.  She has an action figure modeled after her.  Seriously.  Granted, her action figure perpetuates all the stereotypes that come with being a librarian, but still she is living the dream.  She is a retired Seattle librarian and used to make radio appearances to recommend books.  She is basically a real-life, cool version of Frasier.  She has a ton of recognition and awards for her love of literature and work, including the 2011 Library Journal's Librarian of the Year Award. 

3) J. Edgar Hoover

Before cracking down on suspected communists, Hoover was a cataloguer for the Library of Congress.  Apparently people who worked alongside him believed he would one day end up being chief librarian had he not chosen to pursue gangsters. 

4) Joanna Cole

The author of the Magic School Bus series was also an elementary school librarian for some time.  No wonder the creator of Miss Frizzle knows so much about how to engage a child in science.  Librarians know how to do everything. 

That's why her hair's so big.  It's full of secrets!

5) Mao Zedong (Chairman Mao)

Yup. That guy.  He worked as an assistant librarian at the Peking University Library under Li Dazhao, a Marxist who taught Mao all about the wonders of communism and succeeded in converting him.  Congrats?

Young Adult Beginnings

What was the first young adult novel? Well, not everyone agrees.    

In the beginning, books were written for either children or adults, no in-betweens.  No one took into consideration the fact the young adults have different wants, needs, ideas, and/or capabilities than these two prominent audiences.  So, teenagers had to settle for reading one or the other.  There were books that obviously appealed to them, but teens still weren’t being addressed as a separate entity.  

But these were books about teens, so at least they had that, right? Yes and no.  The majority of adult books about teens are stories told by adult narrators reflecting on their past, which leaves you with an adult tone to the work. While reading, you wonder if you can trust the narrator to tell the entire story without censoring  his history and you lose that sense of immediacy that is so important to young adult fiction as we know it today.  These books are also missing the opinions of teenagers because the books reflect the adult morals and viewpoints of their narrators.  Yes, young adult fiction today can still technically espouse adult viewpoints, after all they’re written by adults, but coming from a teenaged narrator gives a teen reader more of a connection to the material.  

So when did that change?

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger was published in 1951 and the teenagers ate it up.  Yes, there was actually a time when teens would clamor to read about the phony-hating Holden, rather than pretend to read it and write book reports about how people play baseball in a field (if you build it, they will come, much?).  Not expecting this type of response from the teenage population, this book was published as “adult” fiction.  Granted, there was really no such thing as “young adult” fiction, so there wasn’t much of a choice on where to place it on the bookshelf.  

It wasn’t until the wonderful 60s that “young adult” fiction became a thing when, in 1967, the then-teen herself S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders.  There was no adult narrator telling the story of his teenage years in The Outsiders.  Instead, you had the story of teenagers as it was happening from the perspective of the youngest.  Fun fact: Like J.K. Rowling, Hinton was urged to publish under her initials because her story features a male protagonist and sexist readers won’t trust a woman to write a book they’ll enjoy.  

Still, others credit Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War with being the first young adult novel.  It was 1974 when this violent novel was first published, sparking a trend in books for young adults that involved realistic problems they endured.  Reading these books was affirmation that someone out there understood what they were going through.  We all know teen years were tough (except for you lucky few I won’t mention).  Fun fact: In another of Cormier’s YA novels, I am the Cheese, there’s a phone number in the book that was actually Cormier’s home phone number.  Readers with nothing better to do who tried that number were often amazed when the actual author answered.

So these books were incredibly groundbreaking in the YA world.  Not only did they address problems teenagers faced and presented teenage perspectives, but they also set the precedent for how long YA novels should be.  If you look at YA novels from this time period, they’re all about 150-180 pages long.  Publishers didn’t think you could hold the attention of children/teens for so many pages and wanted books that were short and (maybe) sweet.  Then BOOM! Harry Potter.  What?! Kids will lug around 700+ page books and READ THEM?! Game-changer.

Back to YA.  A small few will contest that these books were the first of their kind and will name another title: Maureen Daly’s snooze fest Seventeenth Summer.  It’s this atrocious book that’s still being published today with cutesy modern covers to disguise the fact that it was first published in 1942.  It’s about teens, it’s about teenage romance, and it’s about doing nothing. Plus, there’s maybe the tiniest hint of an illegal abortion.  That last part is actually pretty remarkable, especially for the time (which is why it’s only slightly implied in the text), but man is this book BORING.  It’s sappy and all about young love though, so it still sells (alright, I hate sappy crap.  But try it, I dare you).  However, in 1942, Seventeenth Summer wasn’t marketed as a YA book, because that still wasn’t happening in stores or libraries.  Instead, like Catcher in the Rye, it was shelved with the adult fiction.  But because it reads just like a YA novel and is published as such today, some consider it the “first.”

Whatever book you believe to be the first YA novel, just be grateful that it happened and that we got Judy Blume out of the deal.  

Happy Birthday Charles Perrault

Do you like fairy tales? (nope, not looking at you, Swift)  Do you like Disney movies?  Perhaps you enjoy critiquing Disney movies for their blatant sexism and pushing like a drug the idea that girls just need to get married to be happy?  Well then you should wish Charles Perrault (my long lost ancestor, I like to believe/tell people) a happy 384th birthday today or a belated birthday if you read this later.  Do it.  

Perrault started off studying law, did some architect work and some writing, and then decided he was just going to write children's stories.  Fun fact: according to the Wikipedia, Perrault suggested to Louis XIV to include fountains representing Aesop's fables in the Versailles gardens. 

So once he decided his literary focus was going to be for the kids, like a 17th century version of no child left behind, he published Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals aka Tales of Mother Goose.  It included Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots, among others.  So basically a lot of stories with women in submissive roles.  Like all the stories and movies and chick flicks/lit that comes out today! Hooray!!

But no, in all seriousness, the motivation behind them were the morals children could take from these sometimes graphic stories.  The morals were fitting for the time period (I think?), but need a drastic revision for application today.  And that's what fractured fairy tales are for!  Also, his stories are on The List (yay!) so I'll finally be reading the book my 5th grade dance teacher gave me solely because I share his last name.