Do Librarians Love Maurice Sendak?
September 04, 2012
Throughout his career, Where the Wild Things Are? creator Maurice Sendak courted controversy with both his picture books and for speaking out against censorship. For years, he slammed librarians who painted diapers over the nude body of Mickey, the protagonist of his 1970 book In the Night Kitchen. But how many librarians actually covered up Mickey? For the most part, it seemed that Sendak could count a great number of librarians as his fans.
"The extent to which librarians put diapers on Mickey has been most likely greatly exaggerated over the years...At ALA’s 1972 midwinter conference, the Children’s Book Council formally brought the SLJ letter to the attention of the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee as part of its official business meeting. The committee immediately ruled that the practice was a clear violation of the Library Bill of Rights and ordered the preparation of a clarifying statement 'reaffirming the principle that defacement and expurgation of library materials already selected and acquired by libraries clearly denies library patrons their right of access to the materials and infringes equally on the rights of authors, artists, and publishers.'"