We have a vandal in our library. We know him only by his works, the damaged volumes that were pulled out of the stacks during a sweep by a work-study student the other day. Not knowing his identity, I have decided to call him "Todd."*
Vandalism in libraries has been going on as long as there have been libraries to vandalize (hence the modern meaning of the word, vandal-- a person who willfully or ignorantly destroys or mars something beautiful or valuable--as opposed to the original, a Germanic tribe "who in the 5th century A.D. ravaged Gaul and Spain, settled in Africa, and in A.D. 455 sacked Rome.") This is not news.
As students in library school we're introduced to the problems posed by these no-goodniks early on. Sandra Hart wrote an excellent survey paper on the subject for the University of Alberta's MLIS program in 2005, for example. Neither is it a trivial matter to deal with--the University of St. Thomas' Library Director, for instance, could conceivably drop-kick the offender far and wide, if they catch him--but work-studies and staff are busy and policing the stacks is a time and labor intensive activity. We can't be everywhere at once even during the slow times, and on a busy stretch at the circ desk, we can barely be anywhere on demand. So most of the damage we discover is found long after the act is committed.
Granted, my problems at this particular time are minor by any objective standard and don't come close to, say, what the Morecambe Library had to deal with recently. There are other examples too numerous to list (a Google search on "vandalism in libraries" delivered over 535,000 results) but my concerns are limited to Todd for the moment.
I think Todd is a guy and I think he was (or still is) a student here. I think he has a chip on his shoulder. The reason I think these things has to do specifically with the books that were defaced: Writing Without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Authority and the Individual, by Bertrand Russell; Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis; Class: Style and Status in the USA, by Paul Fussell; The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American, edited by Thomas C. Wheeler; and Great European Short Stories, edited by Douglas and Sylvia Angus. These works aren't recent--the book on class is from 1983 and Babbitt goes back to 1922--but they are survey books and together they find their ways into numerous syllabi. The books themselves are old, with yellowing pages and brittle spines. Not exactly the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of size or currency, is what I'm saying. These are elderly volumes.
Then there's the way the books were defaced. It wasn't a case of censorship, for instance: a would-be censor either takes the books home and keeps it, maybe paying a late fine or not as the case may be, or else he rips out the pages entirely. Todd did something I've never seen before: he grabbed a bunch of pages, held them in one hand and ripped them as a sheaf, taking the corners of the pages with him but keeping the bulk of the paper intact. Imagine a book with a portion of the page corners chewed away by moths. That's Todd's signature. The treatments are different only in the number of pages ripped and the size of the bite; the style is consistent.
The weirdest example is the immigrant experience book: there, not only are the pages ripped, but the pages immediately before and after the ripped ones had their corners folded down, as if they were marking the range. If this is Todd's doing it makes him hands-down the most organized vandal I have ever encountered.
I can think of a number of explanations for Todd's wacky behavior. He might have taken an undergrad lit course, and hated these works so much that he decided to take his revenge on them. He might have been using these works as proxies for his professor who gave him a crappy grade. He might have been trying to impress himself or a friend or a prospective mate with his paper-ripping prowess. Or, Todd might just be a dull, bored asshole who hates to read (which doesn't really explain why he's in college, but . . . )
Or maybe I'm being too abrupt. It could be that Todd has a political agenda in choosing these particular works to deface. (I hope that's the case, since it would make him much more interesting as a person.) Let's see: Babbitt is about ambitious, social climbing creep; he hates immigrants and whatever he imagines they represent; has no use for European idea, great or small; can't be bothered about the differences between freedom and order, and apparently hates writing. Is Todd a Young Republican? An Ann Coulter fan? I have no idea. (If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.)
At any rate, we're replacing two of the books that were defaced and will probably just discard the rest. And we'll hope that Todd stays out of the library for a while.
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*I know that statistically, in this school, the offender is more likely to be a female than a male, but I have reasons to believe it's a guy, which I'll get to in a bit. Also, "Todd" is way cooler a name than this (probably) guy deserves to be called--sharing it with, for example, an alien, a robot, and a mathematical construction--but "Insignificant, Book-Destroying Monkey-Faced Creep" is both annoying to type and potentially offensive to monkeys. So, "him" and "Todd," it is.

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