Oddities from the APL Collection

One of our duties here at Austin Public Library is to cull old books. We call it "weeding". We do it continuously, just as new books are published continuously, because if we didn't, we wouldn't be able to fit the new books on the shelves. If we didn't weed, we'd still have astronomy books, for example, that say the sun goes around the earth, that dragons lurk in the skies at the edges of the oceans, that Pluto is a PLANET!


Recently we held a contest to find some of the oldest, oddest, most out of date, least politically correct books in our collection from dark corners of the library that we haven't looked into in awhile. Here are some of the entries. (Click on the photos to enlarge them; the winners are at the top.) If these intrigue you, you might find them soon at the library's used book store, Recycled Reads.


I'm happy to report there exist worse examples in libraries than we found at APL. See them here: Awful Library Books.