Photograph of a teacher-librarian at work.

Anyone involved with the book trade that’s worth their salt, whether a librarian or a publisher,  has at some point had the very special experience of handing someone a book that changed the recipient’s  life on some level. For me it was a security guard in Philadelphia, who was the very first customer I sold a book to when I was opening my bookstore way back in 2003. He wanted to make that rare transition from mass market fare to western philosophy. He read like the wind and wanted to test himself with something weighty. He had a copy of Plato‘s Symposium in his hand and wanted something else to read. I sold him the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius because I thought stoicism would be a noble trait in a security guard (this concept might in part be influenced by my teenage years, but I digress). In the months to come he bought-up our philosophy section. Heidegger, Plato, Russell…everything. He always came back to those two I sold him though and it made me feel like I had done something special, putting those two books in his hand.

For Nora Murphy, a school librarian, her special moment came when she changed the life of a eighth grader named Mario.

Soon after I became a school librarian, a teacher came to me about Mario, an eighth-grader who had never read an entire book. Mario struggled to read at all, and English was not his first language, but he was a bright kid whose teacher believed in him. I recommended a short, funny, mysterious book that appeals to reluctant boy readers. Mario took it home, read it in a week and came back with his friends in tow to check out the remaining titles in the series.

When he was ready to tackle more challenging content, I started him listening to audiobooks while following along in the text, a strategy helpful for building fluency and comprehension. Mario would come to the library even when his track was on vacation, and he’d sit for hours, headphones on, reading. Soon, he was able to transition into reading the books on his own. By the end of that one school year, Mario had read 42 books, exceeding the goal set by the state of California for eighth-graders. He was ready for high school.

That magical story described above is lifted from an article Murphy wrote for the Los Angeles Times and I highly recommend reading it in full.  It’s a remarkable piece about the real-world effects of library budget cuts, this time given the soberly ridiculous acronym of RIF, or “Reduction In Force.” It’s an acronym that sounds more like something needed in Guantanamo than in Los Angeles school system libraries. Murphy points out that librarians in the school environment have to be both full-time educators, with all the specialization that entails, as well as full-time librarians, with those particulars as well. In a sense Murphy is proof of that. She achieved with Mario what eight grades worth of teachers had failed to do: Get Mario to read.

The seemingly universal budget cuts for libraries come at a particularly bizarre time for the library system. Unlike bookstores, libraries have seen increased traffic and circulation of late, perhaps a result of more people borrowing books rather than buying them in order to save money. Whatever the reason, many libraries are seeing the highest traffic rates in years, and yet are still facing budgetary cuts. In most of these cases, like the one Nora Murphy finds herself in, her increasingly flimsy job security has nothing to do with new technology or institutionally flighty approaches to ebooks. That is the case booksellers face, as publishers and chains make rash decisions on a future they know less and less about. Ms. Murphy’s job security is based on two solid decades of shaky economies in California and bureaucrats looking to make cuts to bail out their institutional failures.

Budget cuts, keep in mind, that fail to take a real look at what they are so slapdashedly operating on. Murphy portrays a-day-in-the-life of a school librarian at one point in her piece and if it weren’t for the grim backdrop of RIF it would make you smile instead of shake your head.

School librarians sprint all day, trying to meet the needs of an entire school community. I help one child find information about shipwrecks, the next about electric eels. Teachers come to me for help in planning lessons. At night I read, looking for books that might light up a lonely kid who desperately wants friends, or an angry child facing difficult circumstances, or the voracious reader who has already zipped through most of the library’s fiction. It is wonderfully exhausting.

Libraries are suffering because of the economy. That concept is common knowledge to anyone who follows the fates of libraries. What is especially awful in Murphy’s story is this little detail: Her fellow librarians have been humiliated in a courtroom-like environment, literally in a basement, under the auspices of being given a chance of “fighting for their jobs.” Murphy explains these cruel and unusual encounters with Los Angeles Unified School District‘s lawyers:

The basic question being asked is whether highly trained and experienced teacher-librarians are fit for the classroom. LAUSD’s lawyers seem determined to prove they are not. One librarian, who would like to go back to an elementary classroom if her library is closed, was asked to recite the physical education standards for second-graders, as if failing to do so would mean she was unfit. Another teacher, who wants to return to teaching English, noted that she spent all day in the library effectively teaching English. But her inquisitor quickly started asking questions about the Dewey Decimal System, suggesting that since it involved more math than English, the teacher was no longer practiced in the art of teaching English.

Nowhere in that basement is a question about Mario and that’s not acceptable.