A Paean to Librarians and Libraries in Larry Beinhart's The Librarian
by Van
A university librarian is recruited to catalog the papers of a right-wing businessman. The presidential election is coming up and a conspiratorial group of politicians, bureaucrats, brutal operatives hidden within Homeland Security, and wealthy donors contribute to some very strange events: the major Democratic candidate has a fatal airplane accident just before the convention, other people die, things blow up. This group believes the librarian may have found out something he should not have and decide he needs to be eliminated. The author wrote American Hero, on which the film Wag the Dog is based.
David Hauser, the Librarian, offered these thoughts when asked what it was like to be a librarian:
“It’s a sort of communism, without ideology or Marx or any of that bullshit. We’re in the business of giving away knowledge. For free. Come in, please come, and take some knowledge for free, no, no limit, keep going, gorge on it if you want, no, it’s not a trick, a come on, a free sample and then we’ll bill you later, or we’ll paper your head with banners and pop-ups. Librarians don’t have a lot of status and we don’t make a lot of money, more than poets, but not so much, say, as your more successful panhandlers, so our ideals are important to us and the love of books and the love of knowledge and the love of truth and free information and letting people discover things for themselves and let them, oh, read romance novels or detective novels, whatever they want, and giving poor people Internet access.”
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