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From: wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2024 18:10:33 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
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In article <v9q6sr$1tjk4$1@dont-email.me>,
Michael F. Stemper <michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:
>On 16/08/2024 10.48, Garrett Wollman wrote:
>
>> The library I grew up in seemed to have had, at some point before I
>> started going there, a librarian who considered all SF to be
>> "juvenile".  As a result, *all* of Norton's SF was still shelved in
>> the YA section twenty years later.
>
>Interesting. Your library had a YA section? Mine only had a children's
>section, and an adult section. The children's section had nursery rhymes
>up through Freddy the Pig and Doctor Dolittle.

There was a "children's library" which took up one floor of the old
Carnegie building, and an "adult library" which was all of the new
wing that opened in 1981.  Inside the children's library there was an
open area down the middle, leading to the librarians' desk and behind
them the former main entrance (now an emergency exit).  On the left
side was what we'd now call "middle grades" and below, everything from
picture books to Encyclopedia Brown, and on the right side was
actually labeled "Young Adult", with big sectionos of packaged series
(Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, etc.) and the rest either Dewey (for
the non-fiction) or alpha by author (for the fiction).  In the center
aisle, in addition to the card catalogs, were display shelves of new
books along with some children's reference books (encyclopedias,
Something About the Author, dictionaries).  It's been 40 years but I
could walk in there tomorrow and point out nearly everything I've just
mentioned -- except of course that everything has changed.

My brain wants me to believe that Diane Duane and Robin McKinley were
shelved in the same place, which obviously doesn't make sense
alphabetically.  I am not sure if more modern YA fantasy got its own
subsection -- it was, after all, forty years ago.  They don't seem to
publish a map showing the current layout of the building, and it's a
five-hour drive so I won't be making a detailed comparison.

I forget at what point I was allowed to use the "adult library".  It
must have been some time in 5th or 6th grade because I remember doing
a 6th-grade book report on the first volume of Asimov's autobiography,
which I would have had to go to the adult side to read.  I never read
any of Asimov's juveniles; I'm pretty sure my gateway to Asimov was
through his F&SF science essay collections.

-GAWollman

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)