my remedial seventh and eighth graders couldn't read her books, so we decided to something about it. We couldn't just say, Read! because the library had been stocked before school opened, stocked by someone buying from a grade level list, by someone who believed, no doubt, in the notion of gifted readers. Our library had three copies of Anatonia Fraser's Cromwell, four novels by Faulkner, and two copies of Crime and Punishment. One of the advantages of the good old K-8 building became apparent as soon as we tried to use our new library in our new middle school: all those great fairy tales, Dr. Seuss, and Easy-Read books were missing: no picture books, no Carle, Spier, Lobel, or Sendak. A lot of the universal books were missing, those books everybody can enjoy. Unfortunately, E. B. White, Hoberman, Cole, Ciardi, and Prelutsky are listed only in primary catalogues. Inexplicably, authors like Koningsburg, Patterson, L'Engle, Hinton, and Hunter were also missing. Rotten readers are always eager to go to the library and hang around. They thumb through magazines or look at filmstrips if the librarian insists they must do something besides take the screws out of shelves. Both the librarian and I felt
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Susan Ohanian (1983) studied this question.