Drunks in tutus, drugs in bathrooms and chick fights in parking lots don't sound like the stuff of a librarian's memoir, but Don Borchert's book has them all.
In his recently published "Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library," Borchert culls the strangest stories from his 13 years as an assistant in a small Torrance branch library. With wry humor, he offers an insider's look at how a would-be sanctuary has become, as his title suggests, a catch-all gathering place where devoted readers are joined by Internet-savvy latchkey kids, semi-homeless misfits and everybody in between. The result has librarians talking -- some not so nicely -- about changes in their image and their place of work.
"Everyone knows about the library, but they just see it from the front," Borchert, 58, said recently over lunch near his branch, appearing every bit the librarian -- soft-spoken, white-haired, wire-rim-spectacled and possessed of the patience of a man who's answered countless patron queries over the years. "There's so much else happening that's probably universal to libraries, which is what I wanted to put down on paper."
Librarians are praising the book for busting some of the stereotypes of their profession -- though some say Borchert does not go far enough.
Scott Douglas, who writes the popular Web column Dispatches From a Public Librarian for McSweeney's Internet Tendency and is the author of the upcoming book "Quiet Please," objects to Borchert's claim that librarians are natural introverts. As Douglas wrote on his blog, the stereotype "may be true of librarians fifty years ago, but it's certainly not true today!" Douglas blames Hollywood -- movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Mary Bailey is doomed to be a librarian had her husband never lived, much to his horror.
Then there are those who are upset mostly that Borchert is being called a librarian at all -- the term technically applies only to those who have a master's degree in the field, which Borchert doesn't.
"It is a sensitive area for some people. A lot of fields have this sort of caste system," American Library Assn. President Loriene Roy said. "But to the public, anyone in the library is a librarian."
