I volunteer once a week at a nonprofit organization called "Schoolhouse Supplies," which gives out free school supplies to teachers all over the Portland area. If you ever want to donate to this invaluable organization yourself, here's the best hint I can give: DON'T JUST THROW A BUNCH OF YOUR GARBAGE INTO A BOX, DROP IT OFF, AND PAT YOURSELF ON THE BACK AS YOU DRIVE AWAY. You sure aren't fooling us.
One of the significant corporate contributors to Schoolhouse Supplies is Powell's Books. Powell's, for the unfamiliar, is not only the biggest bookstore in Portland but the biggest in the entire COUNTRY. Their overwhelming downtown location is so large one must use a map inside it.
Every so often Powell's gets a gigantic cardboard box and fills it with all the books they don't want in their inventory anymore, then sends the whole thing to Schoolhouse Supplies. I don't mean just children's material -- Powell's sends us EVERY book they can't sell, whether it's appropriate for children or not. Since we can't do anything with most of it, the bins rest in the back of the store and their contents are free for employees and volunteers.
You might be wondering. Just how bad does a book have to be if the largest bookstore in the country doesn't want it? You're about to find out....for the third consecutive time!
The donated books are sorted by other people. The problem is, not everything that looks like a children's book when you glance at it for one-tenth of a second actually IS one, and many of the teachers I've seen grabbing said books don't look at them either. Sometimes I browse the bookshelves in the back of the store, looking for material that shouldn't be there. Usually, I find it, and I've saved many a teacher's butts by removing that stuff before their students see it.
Several copies of Gary Larson's There's A Hair in My Dirt appeared on the shelf recently, and I'd consider that right on the edge of what's an acceptable elementary book. Its portrayal of the harshness of nature is uncompromising, but there's educational value to that, I guess. My ultimate call was to leave them there. A lot of teachers aren't gonna like the ending, though.
This was discovered by me in a box full of picture books. It's a collection based on a webcomic about a young married couple. Every kid wants to read this, right? It's got cartoon characters on it.
The strip itself is not great, and its title is never explained. It's an According to Jim level of domestic humor. I didn't laugh once. But I'm not typing out the title nor the author's name, lest he find this comment through Google. This decision is not out of cowardice, but out of sympathetic respect for the feelings of cartoonists, which if broken can render hours of their own work time worthless. That can be a pain.
This one is something else. The back description doesn't make the claim it's intended for kids, but it's a picture book written in singsong rhyme that can be finished in five minutes, so....what else can people think?
It's about a guy who spends his entire life trapped at a factory making a product called "SNARK." The book never says what "SNARK" really is, only that everybody buys it, and that any consequences from producing it are worth ignoring as long as it makes our green villain here richer. If that sounds similar to The Lorax, well, The Lorax was never this brutal.
The worst thing about it is, you can't claim anything in it doesn't actually happen. At China's Foxconn, which makes many of the electronics you own and have used today, conditions are so bad that they're gaining a reputation for suicides. Foxconn's solution was to string nets around their buildings to catch the jumpers. To add insult to insult, their nets were cheap and didn't work.
I don't think this is the kind of thing every teacher who strolls through Schoolhouse Supplies wants to stock in their library. But if you want your children completely unsheltered from the savagery and evil of humankind, here's their bedtime story for you.
And this one? Wow. Do you want to know?
If I was a lesser man, I would have put this right back and anticipated the inevitable calamity with glee. But it would have most likely taken place at the school it wound up in, so I wouldn't see any of it. So why bother?
This picture book is what it looks like -- an alternate version of JRR Tolkien's trilogy, legally protected under parody, where everybody goes nuts and rampages around Middle Earth with blunt weapons, resulting in lots and lots of bloody violence. I guess now I know what Nemi read as a kid.