SciFi Wire wrote:Manga Pulled From Libraries
Bill Postmus, chairman of the board of supervisors of San Bernadino County, Calif., has ordered the county's libraries to remove the book Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics from circulation, according to the ICv2.com Web site. In an announcement on the county's Web site, Postmus called the book "obscene," saying, "That book is absolutely inappropriate for a public library, and as soon as I was made aware of it yesterday, I ordered it to be removed immediately."
The book was brought to the attention of the county after a 16-year-old checked it out of the adult section of a Victorville library. The teen's mother "was horrified," according to a story in the local newspaper, Desert Dispatch, and wrote a letter to the library asking that the book be removed, the Web site reported. The county-wide system had 13 copies of the book in its collection.
County Library Collection Development Coordinator Nannette Bricker-Barrett said in a statement to the newspaper that it was the parents' responsibility to determine what a minor checked out of the adult section. "The library does not act as a parent," she said. "It is the library's responsibility to offer a broad spectrum of materials, not to exclude materials."
The 2004 illustrated trade paperback, written by Paul Gravett and published by Harper Design, follows the history of Japanese comics and includes, in several chapters, discussion of adult comics that depict sex and violence. Although Postmus said in his statement that the book contains "sex with animals," evidence of such has not been confirmed.
Postmus has also called for the country library "to draft a plan to protect children from inappropriate books and other materials that may currently exist in the county library system," the Web site reported.
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.ph ... 0&id=35589
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