[phendrenad2]

I think librarians tend to become creatures-that-shovel-books. Librarians come to think of books as this sort of continuum, an ooze that they just pipe from one stack to another. Housing the books and following the proper procedures becomes the important thing, not the words on the pages.

But that's completely the wrong attitude. Books are NOT all created equal. A schlocky romance novel is not equivalent to a book by Kierkegaard, or Vonnegut, or Plath, despite the fact that they are just a bunch of leaves between bindings with an ISBN stamped on the back.

So it's telling when the top comment on a story about professors fighting to save books from being carelessly thrown away is that there exists a basement full of romance novels. The narrator is faulty in this story.