Week of Oct. 17, 2024

From the editor’s desk

Last Saturday, Anthony Doerr, the Idaho-based, best-selling author, spoke fondly of libraries in his keynote talk during the Nevada Humanities Literature Crawl. His 2021 novel Cloud Cuckoo Land is, in part, a love letter to libraries. He asked the audience to imagine suggesting to Congress today that there should be a publicly funded institution that provides story hours, bridge clubs, Dungeons & Dragons clubs, research help, job-searching assistance, free internet access, a warm place to spend the day if you’re unhoused, and a long list of other services—not to mention countless pieces of public property in the form of actual, physical books that anyone may take home.

It would be, to say the least, an extremely hard sell. Good thing we got around to establishing them a couple of centuries ago. (Benjamin Franklin launched the nation’s first lending library in 1790, and the first fully tax-supported library opened in 1833.)

Libraries nationwide, including our own Washoe County Library System, have been under attack by right-wing extremists in recent years. As 2024 began, the RN&R reported that right-wing organizers had taken control of the board. Protestors were campaigning to remove books with LGBTQ+ and diversity-related themes. An unusually large crowd of 150—both protestors and supporters—showed up at the particularly tense December 2023 board meeting, where the board tried to fire library director Jeff Scott, despite the staff’s widespread approval of his work.

In September, months after a librarian was injured in a protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, we reported that county officials (not library officials, to be clear) nixed future installments of that event.

I spoke with Scott by phone this morning, and he said he’s seen signs that the protest movement is losing steam. The September board meeting, he said, lasted only 40 minutes, far less than the three or four hours that last winter’s meetings were taking, due to lengthy public comment periods. 

At last night’s board meeting, attendance was around 25 or so—most of them staff—a far cry from the 150 that had turned out in December. A few longtime protestors were there last night, but Scott said that in recent months, “supporters have often outnumbered the library antagonists.”

The downward trend in library protests mirrors a national one. Scott recently spoke with Ashley Stewart from EveryLibrary, a national group that fights censorship and opposes anti-library legislation. Scott told her that while the Washoe County GOP’s official stance is “no on WC1”—the ballot measure proposing that we continue to reserve a chunk of (already collected) tax revenue for the library—party members don’t seem to be pushing that message very hard. Stewart said that she’s seeing similar anti-library movements nationwide start to wither as well. 

Scott said he’s somewhat surprised—and cautiously optimistic.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor