Encountering Bigfoot in Children's Nonfiction, or, a Crisis of Taxonomy

I revisit my childhood library in dreams. From infancy to 16,1 our family visited every Tuesday night—barring illness or travel. From an early age, my parents released me in the children’s area. I know, unattended small child. But as an intense rules-follower who learned to read at 4, I hope I didn’t cause much stress for the library’s workers, all of whom I soon knew by name.

The children’s room was a site of many happy memories and engaging stories. I can also recall four distinct childhood crises between ages 6 and 8, all inspired by premature explorations of the non-fiction section. The first two were unfortunate but unremarkable, crises of an era: learning about the existence of killer bees and the risk to the ozone layer. I nearly had a crisis over some mutually-assured destruction books, but my mom reminded me that the Soviet Union didn’t exist any more (if barely). If I’d been older, this might have caused more stress over what had or hadn’t happened to all those nukes, but I accepted the intentionally-soothing explanation.

It’s More a Crisis of Taxonomy

The other two crises were entirely taxanomic and still come to mind as I browse the nonfiction as of whatever public library I happen to be visiting. As an early reader and literal child, I operated under some straightforward frameworks. Of the two stack rows of “older” children’s books, the row of shelves on the right were all fiction, or stories that weren’t true. On the left, however, I could find books that were not fiction, so probably true. I think the dichotemy was emphasized by my mother’s careful selection of non-fiction for our trips home.2

Left on my own, I scoured the sections I found strange and thrilling—grabbing a prize, hiding in the stacks, and devouring it. This all worked fine… until the Bigfoot and aliens incident. I don’t even know the book’s title, but I’m sure it was in 001.94s. It probably took a meta-perspective, but all I remember were the stories of real people. Although I used Bigfoot in the title, the real section which frightened me was one about aliens… which abducted people. I’d been taught not to go places with strangers, but what if they kidnapped me in the middle of the night?

People escaped kidnappers. Police officers rescued kidnapped children.3 Aliens, though? They might take me away forever. Imagining the woods behind my house might have a Bigfoot didn’t help much either. Little me succumbed to some panic attacks before getting told by her mom that these people were liars.

The second crisis was the discovery of vampires. Vampires were all OVER non-fiction. They were in the 001s. They were elsewhere too… perhaps film and folklore? At least one of the books I encountered included pictures from vampire films, pictures which I was too young to know weren’t real. My imaginative mind ran wild, increasing my fear of the dark and of strangers. I think I was 9 before my mother sorted that one out.4

That’s One Way To Classify Knowledge

Of course, these fears were caused by a misunderstanding of both non-fiction and library classification. As an adult, I often recall ways in which, as an early reader, I encountered things which outpaced my intellectually capacity. I could read all the words of a book, including the big ones, and grab a dictionary FROM NONFICTION if I needed to look up a word. But I didn’t have the kinds of critical evaluation skills I would later develop, including the skill to say “oh, this is a book about stories people tell” and “the classification 001.9 means it’s something lots of people don’t believe is real.”

More recently, I was thinking about the composition of that section of a children’s room and how it particularly lent itself to these kinds of confusions. Let’s take a quick stroll through the 00xs, shall we?

Paging Children’s Nonfiction

Not much from the rest of 001 makes it into the children’s non-fiction. Intellectual life, research, etc., are a bit dry for that set. So right up front? 001.9, “controversial knowledge.” A choice, for sure. Bigfoot and Nessie and some kind of devil which lived just over the Jersey border!

Next up we have The Book (unlikely to spawn many children’s books), and a bunch of stuff on computers, which were just becoming a thing for children’s books at that time. I’m sure we had some then. I recall reading a few. Also exciting stuff! And very true—my dad worked with computers! Next is Bibliography…which we may have had, but it would’ve certainly seemed dry and boring nonfiction to little Ruth. Then books about libraries and running libraries. Again, unlikely to surface in the children’s section.

And following that? Encyclopedias! The books you used to learn about everything. Although some were in children’s reference, quite a few smaller ones could be found here.

So, let’s review…

Bigfoot, UFOs, vampires, GHOSTS… then books about computers, which I was just learning how to use, and then encyclopedias, where I knew I should look for all kinds of knowledge. I don’t know how you’d expect a young child to tell the difference.5

A shout-out to everyone who knew me as a child and read this post. You get it.

Footnotes


  1. At 16, I leveled up to working there as a page, but the next year they remodeled that library, dramatically changing and expanding it. The first library haunts me, though—dark brown brick walls… purple and orange upholstery… ↩︎

  2. I did understand that the 390s were collections of stories, but they were very clearly labeled as such. I don’t recall if we had much in the 8xx, but it was at least similarly labeled. ↩︎

  3. This sentence describes my understanding of the world as someone raised by white parents who had generally-positive opinions of the police. ↩︎

  4. I do know that at age 8, when my mother told me where babies come from and asked if I had any questions, I only had one. “So, where to zombies come from?” Having been given only a cursory understanding of what “The Talk” would entail, I’d been saving this question for over a year. To her credit, she told me (it left me still kind of confused, given the reasons for my question and her utter lack of awareness of zombies in popular culture). ↩︎

  5. Yes, I know, one moral of the story is to engage heavily with your children’s library use and have a thorough knowledge of nuances of the Dewey Decimal System and be aware of what they’re looking at at every moment and… I don’t blame my mom for letting me explore and not realizing this freaked me out… (whereas I do blame someone else for showing me Killer Tomatoes Eat France when I was just 8 and had no context for what it was satirizing). ↩︎