In the run up to Christmas I will blog a few gift ideas for the librarian in your life. The first is the Japanese manga/ anime/ film Library Wars. In the Library Wars world, being a librarian isn't just about answering reference queries (though cataloguing, circulation and reference still play their part). It also involves being a crack shot, abseiling down library buildings and thwarting violent kidnappers. The key idea is that censorship has a stranglehold on society. Any books that are judged unsuitable from a moral, social or political point of view are seized by the army of the "Media Betterment Committee" (MBC) and destroyed.
Libraries have become a bastion of resistance, defended by the Library Task Force, and the brave librarians take their lives in their hands protecting books. The trigger for the whole series is the MBC storming a bookshop where the young heroine is about to buy the new addition to her favourite fantasy series, only to have the book snatched from her hand. Heroically, a member of the Library Task Force defends her right to read it and returns it to her: this leads to her determination to make the Library Forces her career.
To be honest, it is not the best anime/ manga I have encountered, but neither is it the worst, and I can't help smiling at a series where one moment the heroine is being chided for not shelving books accurately enough, and next moment she is sniping at MBC soldiers, to help ensure that a valuable cache of books gets helicoptered to safety.
Unfortunately it looks as though, if based in the West, the manga is the only medium that seems easy to get hold of at the moment, but I am the proud possessor of the anime series (13 episodes) and was also luck to catch the first of the live-action film versions on an international plane journey. I have embedded the trailer of the third live action film, as it includes a glimpse of a library book cart, the line "Deliver that book!! People are waiting!!", plus lots of rather cross librarians (and also a lot of books being destroyed, one way or another). This is the information on the Anime News Network site (there are reviews for the anime and some volumes of the manga): Manga: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=8952; Library Wars live action film https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=20111; Library War (note the lack of the plural in this version) anime https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=8951
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