“I do not sell reefers to my young customers, but I do something almost as reprehensible — I keep "series" books on my shelves. These are books, for example, the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, today's equivalents to all the admirable, if two-dimensional, characters who gladdened our youth. They're on the public library informal Index Expurgatorius, and most teachers want their students to read only novels and classics — not such childhood classics as the Bobbsey Twins. The usual objection is that such books are unrealistic, and this is quite true. The heroes are all incredibly upright, forthright, downright, and outright, and the baddies are so bad you can hardly stand it. But if a book can keep one boy or girl off a street corner for an evening, it has served its purpose. I know a good many parents who can't do as much. Once on an experiment, I filled two shelves of a classroom bookcase with comic books and two shelves with fiction. It made quite a contrast — the fresh, colorful folders beside the worn re-bound old books. The incredible monsters and heroes were the obvious favorites, but in the stretch they faded; the old beat-up books won. All the hyperthyroid whoop-de-do seemed to pall after a while. I'm willing to let my library patrons work up to the classics, starting wherever they want to — even with series books, loathed as they are by most librarians.”