How to Get More Conservative Books into Your Library

A guest submission from a bold and brave librarian

Thank you to Laura Skalitzky, the Princeton Public Library Director in Princeton, Wisconsin for this detailed action plan for our readers about how you can get more conservative books into your library.

We welcome guest submissions - signed or anonymous - on topics related to children’s literature, books, publishing, and more. Please be in touch if you’re interested in writing for us.

As a librarian, there are so many ways to silently censor books you don't like.
You can simply not purchase them, for starters. But once you have them, you can damage them (or just check them out to the library's account for unnecessary "repairs"), never put them on display, mis-shelve them, "lose" them, put unattractive covers on them, or just check them out to yourself for months at a time so that no one else sees them. I have seen all of these methods talked about on left-learning librarian's internet forums, including the American Library Association Think Tank's Facebook page. While activists on both sides of the political aisle have used some of these tactics, the vast majority of librarians are left-leaning. According to aa 202 Bloomberg article, of the 12,000 librarians who donated to the 2020 presidential campaign, 93 percent gave to President Joe Biden. Many of these leftist librarians have cast aside the sacred neutrality that comes with being a taxpayer-funded government institution in favor of hardcore activism. So for the average citizen, getting conservative books in the library is an uphill battle. Here are a few ways to fight for equal representation and library neutrality, from easiest to hardest:

Request Books

To critics who decry the lack of conservative books in libraries, one common reply is, "we don't see a demand for those." This may not be 100% honest, but it's at least plausible. Make sure it becomes less so. Go to your library, get a library card, and request conservative books, movies, and magazines! If your local library doesn't have the materials you want, request that they be purchased, or at least sent from a connected library. (Many libraries are part of a cooperative "library system" which shares books and resources.) Tell your friends and family to request conservative books too. Maybe you could start a monthly book club! At some point, the demand should trigger your librarian to purchase more. Some libraries or library systems even have policies which state that a library must purchase a title after a certain number of their patrons request it within a short time period. Also, in most cases a library's funding is directly tied to how many books it checks out each year, so libraries have an incentive to buy what people want to read.

Recommend and Review

Often, librarians are unknowingly surrounded by a bubble of leftist publishers, catalogs, library associations, and colleagues that makes it hard to find conservative books. If your librarian is a reasonable person, offer some suggestions and tips. Explain why the New York Times bestseller list is biased, and recommend publishing houses like Regnery. Tell your librarian about a 40% off sale at christianbook.com, and give them a glowing recommendation of Lane Walker's hunting and fishing chapter books aimed at boys.

Content reviews can be helpful too, especially when you find deliberately sneaky agenda-pushing books like "Bathe the Cat." On the surface, it's a children's picture book about a silly, distracted family getting ready for a visit from grandma. There's nothing in the title or the book's description that would lead you to think this is a left-leaning book. But it contains two black/Hispanic dads with three kids, and enough rainbows, transgender flags, and gay symbols to stock a pride parade. The publisher doesn't advertise it as an LGBTQIA+ book, and the cover looks benign, so your librarian might not even know about the content when purchasing it. You would be shocked how many times this kind of thing happens. Speak up! Don't be rude, just say something like, "Hey, I notice this book has _____, were you aware of that?" You're not asking for the librarian to ban the book, you are making them aware that there's an agenda in it they may not have seen. If a librarian is truly trying to have a balanced collection, they'll take this into account.

Leave both good and bad reviews of books on Amazon and Goodreads, talk about books with your friends and family, and participate in library book clubs. Make your voice heard!

Donate Books (but read "The Dangers of Donating" below)

The number one reason you may hear for not including certain books in a library's collection is "we can't afford it." Sometimes this is true, but sometimes it's a smokescreen. You can skip the argument and just donate conservative books you'd like to see on the library's shelves. For best effect, make sure that the books are recent (less than three years old), in good condition (no mildew, stains, torn pages, etc), and that the library doesn't have them already. Most libraries have online card catalogs you can search, just like Google, to see which books they have or don't have.

Gift a Subscription  (but read "The Dangers of Donating" below)

 There are some high-quality but pretty cheap conservative publications out there that you can easily sign your library up to receive. The best part about subscriptions is that they keep coming, with no further effort from you. Sometimes, that's all it takes-- a willingness to put your money where your mouth is.

Suggested subscriptions:

National Review: $60/year for 24 magazines. First published in 1955, it's been a bastion of conservative intellectual thought since. It's like "Time" or "Newsweek," but for the right.

Washington Examiner Magazine: $49/year for 44 magazines. The executive editor is the tall, dark, and handsome husband of Bethany, who added this recommendation to Laura’s post (with her permission).

Brave Books: quality children's books with conservative and Christian morals, each endorsed by a conservative celebrity. One book each month for $19/month, or $16/month if you buy a year's subscription upfront ($191.88).

The Epoch Times: $150/year for this excellent comprehensive conservative weekly newspaper.

Backwoods Home: $40/year for a large, quality, quarterly magazine featuring recipes, tips on livestock, homeschooling, gardening, canning, firearms, and off-grid living. Minimal politics.

Christianity Today: This popular magazine has been around for over 50 years, and addresses hot-button issues in a way that will appeal to readers from both sides of the political aisle, while upholding its integrity. 10 issues per year for $24.99 or three years (30 issues) for $59.99.


The Dangers of Donating

Let's start with a fairly benign issue: unwanted donations. Many people think that libraries should be grateful to accept any and all donations of items, but that's rarely the case. Well-intentioned people bring stacks of moldy romance paperbacks or textbooks from the 1960s to libraries all the time. Aside from the biohazard risk and complete lack of interested readers, libraries have limited shelf space for all of these "gifts." As a result, many libraries have collection policies which allow them to reject donations for any reason, or to do whatever they want with them (including quietly putting them in the trash). Even some really good older books might not make it onto shelves, because people just won't check them out. A library can't afford to store many unwanted books, especially when its funding is reliant on how many items people check out. This is often genuinely heartbreaking for librarians. Then again, there's... "unwanted" donations.

Now for the really controversial stuff. Sometimes a librarian will reject donations because these books, DVDs, or magazines don't fit with their political views. Sad, but true. Sometimes a librarian will consciously do this, but more often they don't recognize their biases. They actually believe that they're doing the right thing by protecting people from "hate speech," "transphobia," or "racism," and that the public wouldn't want these items anyway. This has happened in numerous libraries with books by Dr. Seuss ("On Beyond Zebra"), Laura Ingalls Wilder ("Little House on the Prairie"), J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series), Abigail Shrier ("Irreversible Damage"), Matt Walsh ("Johnny the Walrus,"), Ryan T. Anderson ("When Harry Became Sally"), and many others. While the right is up in arms about actual pornography in teen books, the left's censorship is far more devious-- they seek to ban ideas that don't fit with theirs.

So before you spend a lot of time or money donating books or other materials, make sure you talk to a librarian or library board member. You have to ensure that your donations will actually be cataloged and put on the shelves, or there's no point in donating them. The best thing to do is to ask straightforwardly in an email, preferably with a picture of the book(s):  "I have some items I'd like to donate, but I don't want to see them go on the book sale. If I were to donate this, would you catalog it for your collection?" If you are rejected or ignored, well, at least you won't have wasted your money or books.

If you are absolutely determined to see a certain book get on your library's shelves, you can try due process. Go directly to the library board president and ask that your donation proposal be put on the agenda for the next library board meeting. Be prepared to actually show up to that meeting and state why you think the library needs the book you want to donate. Back up your statements with facts about how many copies the books has sold, good reviews from mainstream publications, the current demand for the book, whether other libraries have it, etc. If your donation is accepted by the board, check back in within a month and make sure your donation is actually on the shelves. With your library card, check out your donation once in a while to ensure that it's in good condition and hasn't been "weeded" due to "lack of circulation." Ultimately, however, you don't have any real power over the library's book collection. Unless...

Become a Library Board Member

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." This tactic has been successful with school boards across America. If you don't like the way things are going, become one of the people who make things go! Library boards create policies that govern libraries and library staff. Library boards also have the power to hire, evaluate, discipline, and fire library directors. Most of the time, getting on a library board is pretty easy. Check your state and local laws for the makeup of your board, and make sure you qualify for any open position (sometimes a board has to have a certain number of representatives from the local school or rural area). Ask a city or village official to be appointed. It's an unpaid position, but there's usually only one monthly meeting to attend.

Once you're on the library board, start by asking LOTS of questions. Sometimes there aren't good answers, and it's your job as a library board member to create policies and procedures that will fix things.
What are the demographics of the community? What are the demographics of the library's users? Do the books being purchased reflect the demographics?
What is the library's staff discipline policy? You'll need one in place if you have to rein in an activist librarian.
What are the board's bylaws? Too often, board members have overstayed their terms, or don't meet the legal requirements to be a board member.
Does the library have a political neutrality policy? Write one that reinforces the library's role as a neutral government entity, and bans political displays.
What is the library's collection policy? This dictates which items can be bought and cataloged.
Is there an acquisitions committee, or is the director or another library staff member in charge of purchasing? What criteria do they use?
 How much money does the library spend on materials each year? What percent of the budget is allocated to adult and children's fiction and nonfiction, DVDs, audiobooks, etc?

This last question can help give you an idea of what is proportionally appropriate in your library.  For example, let's say you want your library to buy Ron DeSantis's "The Courage to Be Free," "Decades of Decadence," by Mark Rubio, and four or five similar nonfiction bestsellers. If the library's entire budget for materials is $15,000 per year, and $1,000 of that is earmarked for adult nonfiction books, this means that the library may only be able to purchase a total of about 54 adult nonfiction books each year (at a rough average of $18.50 each).  The greatest demand in nonfiction subjects is usually gardening, health, self-help, cookbooks, biographies and crafts. Let's say the library spends 4/5 of their nonfiction budget on those categories. This leaves about $200 for everything else, or about 11 books. Those books could be about exercise, sports, travel, animals, games, religion, computers and technology, poetry, science, or language-learning. If you want the librarian to purchase seven books of conservative political commentary, you might be expecting too much. On the other hand, if your library's adult nonfiction book budget is $3,000, and the librarian hasn't purchased a single conservative book all year, you have a right to be angry!

Unfortunately, librarians don't necessarily break down their materials budgets based on category. Even if they do, they can fudge a little. For example, take "Irreversible Damage" by Abigail Shrier, a nonfiction commentary on the physical and mental dangers of transgenderism, "gender affirmation" surgery, and hormone therapy, particularly for girls. A neutral or conservative librarian might catalog this book as health or social sciences. A liberal librarian might classify the book as "political commentary," or another category "less worthy" of funding, thereby justifying their decision not to purchase it. Fiction is even harder to classify. These are things you can, and should, ask your librarian about- but do your own research as well.


Go Beyond the Library Board

Let's say you've tried again and again to get conservative books into your library with no result. The library board members aren't listening. They should be fair arbiters of the law, ensuring accountability, transparency, and political neutrality in every aspect of a library's business. Sadly, library boards sometimes do uphold a library director's decision to act as a leftist propaganda department. If that's the case, you need to go above the library board's head. Make sure you have thoroughly documented your case before you do so! You'll need meeting minutes, concrete examples of where policies, laws, or bylaws were violated, and specific instances of bias. Tie these all together with a specific request (one that's within the power of whomever you approach to grant). For example:

To the honorable members of the Silver City Council,
Today I am bringing before you several matters which I believe require your attention.
On ______ [date] the Silver City Library Board ______________ [statement of fact]. This is a violation of ___________ [specific law, bylaw, or policy].
On ______ [date] the Silver City Public Library Director ________________ [statement of fact]. This is a violation of ___________ [specific law, bylaw, or policy].
I have included the appropriate meeting minutes and other documentation which will prove these statements to be true.
I am requesting that you ___________________________ [course of action such as investigation, removal of a board member, discipline or firing of a city employee, etc]. I am prepared to present this matter in person. Please add this matter to the agenda of your next meeting. I request to be informed of the date, time, and agenda of this meeting at my address (below).

Sincerely,  ________

Have someone go through all of this with you, so that your argument is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. Then send your documents in an email AND as a certified letter to the person in charge, whether that be the mayor, city council president, etc. DO show up at meetings well-dressed, prepared, and as calm and professional as possible. It helps to bring supporters too (even if they must stay silent). You can also go to your library system's board, state education department, and elected representatives. You can also go to your local reporters. But be careful!

Schools and libraries have developed an image over the years, justified or not, as being benevolent, child-nurturing institutions under constant threat from cold-hearted bureaucrats who don't care if little Johnny learns to read. Any attempt at reform is likely to be seen as an attack on a library, and will result in a cry of, "but it's for the children!"  Hoards of supporters will appear, loudly defending "education," "diversity," the "freedom to read," etc. You will be accused of being a fascist, a bigot, and a hundred other slurs. Hold the line. Stay calm. Above all, don't apologize- it only makes things worse.

When speaking at meetings or to the press, here are some talking points you can use:

There's nothing wrong with wanting equal representation. A library's collections should reflect its community, which in many cases is comprised of around 50% conservative or moderate voters. In addition, about 63% of the U.S. population claims to be Christian.

What you are aiming to do is to fight censorship, including the "silent censorship" that happens when librarians won't purchase conservative materials.

Public libraries are funded by local taxpayers. Local taxpayers should have a say in what kinds of materials a library purchases.

Political bias should not be allowed in government institutions, and public servants should not be activists. Would you want your mail carrier or your child's teacher to promote political ideas while at work? Should a policeman be able to do so while he's on patrol? If the answer is no, then librarians shouldn't be activists either.

Librarians often try to justify promoting leftist beliefs and materials by framing them as "truth" rather than political ideas. By the same token, they justify not promoting conservative ideas and materials by saying that they are "misinformation," or "hate speech."  It should not be a librarian's job to make this judgement. The American people should be allowed to decide for themselves.

The American Library Association’s “Freedom to Read” statement says, in part, “Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad. We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. We do not believe they are prepared to sacrifice their heritage of a free press in order to be ‘protected’ against what others think may be bad for them. We believe they still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression.”

Be Brave and Committed

This is at the end of the list, because it's the hardest. It's also the most necessary. There are so many of us out here who want to fight for what's right, but we're afraid of retribution. We have seen so many others insulted, doxed, threatened, and fired for their beliefs that it's no wonder we're hesitant to stand up. But is living a comfortable life worth the price? If we continue to cower before the woke mob, nothing will change, and future generations will suffer.

We ourselves are also diminished by our cowardice. Every time we don't stand up for what's right, we are lessened, spiritually and morally. Too much of that, and we will be shadows of ourselves, our lives devoid of meaning. That doesn't mean we have to fight the big battles right away. It's OK to take small stands at first. Build up your courage, and start speaking out, even if the words are small and halting.

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you." -Deuteronomy 31:6