Not even libraries are safe from the scourge of the big-chain retail model.

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax [County Public Library] is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves—and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone—even if they are classics.

“We’re being very ruthless,” said Sam Clay, director of the twenty-one-branch system since 1982. “A book is not forever. If you have forty feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.”

That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers, and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books.

O brave new world! I can understand why a library might discard books on tulips, but the future is looking pretty bleak for classics.

“I think the days of libraries saying, ‘We must have that, because it’s good for people,’ are beyond us,” said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. “There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody’s got a favorite book they’re trying to promote.”

[...]

Every branch gets a printout of the data each month, including every title that hasn’t circulated in the previous twenty-four months. It’s up to librarians to decide whether a book stays. The librarians have discretion, but they also have targets, collection manager Julie Pringle said. “What comes in is based on what goes out,” she said.

Classics such as Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are among the titles that haven’t been checked out in two years and could be eliminated. Librarians so far have decided to keep them.

[...]

As Fairfax bets its future on a retail model, some librarians say that the public library may be straying too far from its traditional role as an archive of literature and history.

Arlington County’s library director, Diane Kresh, said she’s “paying a lot of attention to what our customers want.” But if they aren’t checking out Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she’s not only keeping it, she’s promoting it through a new program that gives forgotten classics prominent display.

“Part of my philosophy is that you collect for the ages,” Kresh said. “The library has a responsibility to provide a core collection for the cultural education of its community.”

Despite Ms. Kresh’s promotion of forgotten classics, I find it hard to remain optimistic. Aldous Huxley, through Mustapha Mond, had it right the whole time: this is sounding more and more like a case of doing away with certain books simply because they’re old.

(Update: John Miller weighs in on Fairfax County’s new library policy. “Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a good dictionary as the model. Such a dictionary doesn’t merely describe the words of a language—it provides proper spelling, pronunciation, and usage. New words come in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a foundation of linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends.”)