Tuesday, February 9, 2010

More a collection development musing than a review

So, I just read Neil Gaiman/P. Craig Russell's The Dream Hunters. As I have said before, I am wary of Neil Gaiman, although I've liked everything of his I've read after that first traumatic experience. And I like P. Craig Russell's foxes. I feel like I've seen his foxes somewhere, can't remember where....Anyways, in common with many people, I liked Dream Hunters. The question is, should I get it for the library?

One of the first requests I got when I came here two years ago was "it's horrible that you don't have any Sandman!" Upon investigation, we actually did have a few Sandman hidden in the adult nonfiction and after some thought, I moved them to the YA graphic novels. Ok. One year later, we got a complaint from a guy whose 15 year old daughter had checked them out. He had kindly put post-it notes marking all the...unclothed body parts. Didn't want to file a formal challenge, just wanted us to know or something. I dunno.

If we had an adult graphic novel collection, I'd put Sandman in there, because I feel it's more an adult book, although certainly there are many teen fans. But right now most adults go to our teen collection for graphic novels, because teen and adult are in there (except for REALLY adult stuff, like LOEG). But....Sandman doesn't really check out that much. Maybe if we had the whole collection?

Dream Hunters has got a lot of "unclothed body parts", although not much more than any regular Sandman. But as Sandman doesn't seem to be really popular....then again, I seem to have a growing group of manga fans, so the Japanese angle might attract them. On the other hand, they're manga fans, not Japanese culture fans.

Sigh. I think I will go back to tabulating the number of vampire novels I am buying and wondering "why?"

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