Librarians

Anna "Jeanne" Layton, 77, a Utah librarian who grabbed national headlines in 1979 when she was fired for refusing to pull the novel "Americana" from the shelves, died Jan. 19 of natural causes in Kaysville, Utah. County officials said the book -- Don DeLillo's first novel -- was obscene and demanded it be pulled from the shelves. When Layton twice refused, the library board fired her. Layton filed a lawsuit after her dismissal, and a federal judge ruled that it was up to the county Merit Council to determine if there was cause for the firing.

A Baltimore librarian's classroom project is now part of publishing history. "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village," first conceived a decade ago by Laura Amy Schlitz, is this year's winner of the John Newbery Medal for best children's book. The Randolph Caldecott award for top picture book went to Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a 500-plus page hybrid of a graphic novel and traditional illustration about an orphan boy and a robot in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.

As has happened in other states, cash-strapped schools in Washington are dropping librarians to save money: This year, Federal Way cut 20 librarian positions. Spokane reduced 10 librarians to half-time. Darrington cut two librarians. A school in Marysville eliminated its half-time librarian. Libraries are open less, their programs minimized, jobs combined. In many cases, part- timers with little formal library training are replacing skilled veterans.

Re "The 'shhhhhh' manifesto," Opinion, April 10 It was a relief to discover that I'm not the only individual who uses the library for reference, reading and writing. Whether I'm in Los Angeles or in the Pennsylvania countryside, where I reside part of the year, some of the libraries I attend have become echo chambers of cellphone rings, raised voices, snacking and, in some cases, singing in the reference sections. By the way, it's not just "young people" who make noise. I've witnessed ages 5 to 85, male and female whooping it up in the stacks as well as the reference area.

Susan Patron is the kind of reader who really lives books: She jokes that years before she came to work in the Los Angeles Public Library system she spent virtually all her free time in its branches. When she met the man who would become her husband, some of their early dates were at Chatterton's, the now shuttered Los Feliz bookstore.

A federal appeals court wrestled Wednesday with whether to grant a new trial to a man on death row for the horrific 1979 murder of a USC student librarian. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is considering whether Stevie Lamar Fields' conviction for the rape, robbery and murder of Rosemary Carr Cobb was contaminated by a juror's failure to disclose that his wife had been a rape victim, and by the jury foreman's recitation of Bible verses during the trial's death penalty phase.

In Los Angeles, a city known for discarding history, Mayme Clayton defied convention by collecting it. For four decades she prowled garage sales, flea markets, attics, used-book stores, even dumps. From these waste heaps of memory, the soft-spoken librarian rescued thousands of rare and unusual books, movies, sound recordings, photographs, letters and ephemera, much of it dating to the slavery era.

Re "For Delta Librarian, the End," Column One, Sept. 23 This stimulating and beautifully written article reads like a novel yet forces us to confront two of the most serious challenges facing our country: poverty and illiteracy. No democracy functions well without an educated society. How can we, the richest country in the world, justify the poverty that still crushes so many of our own people? Thank you for telling this story so eloquently. LAURIE GUITTEAU Santa Barbara Just wanted to thank you for publishing the story on the librarian in the Mississippi Delta.

It's not easy to escape the Delta. People have been writing songs for 100 years about how hard it is to escape, especially this part of the Delta, where the crushing poverty and the heat storms and the ghost towns get hold of you and won't let go. Some used to hop a train out, but the trains don't stop here anymore. Some worked their way out, but jobs have gotten scarce. Few dreamed of escaping through books. Then Ronnie Wise came along. How many have learned to read because of Wise?