238
Souter, J., dissenting
gloss on First Amendment standards, allowing for blocking out anything unsuitable for adults.
Institutional history of public libraries in America discloses an evolution toward a general rule, now firmly rooted, that any adult entitled to use the library has access to any of its holdings.4 To be sure, this freedom of choice was apparently not within the inspiration for the mid-19th-century development of public libraries, see J. Shera, Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England, 1629-1855, p. 107 (1949), and in the infancy of their development a "[m]oral censorship" of reading material was assumed, E. Geller, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876-1939, p. 12 (1984). But even in the early 20th century, the legitimacy of the librarian's authority as moral arbiter was coming into question. See, e. g., Belden, President's Address: Looking Forward, 20 Bull. Am. Libr. Assn. 273, 274 (1926) ("The true public library must stand for the intellectual freedom of access to the printed word"). And the practices of European fascism fueled the reaction against library censorship. See M. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 248 (4th ed. 1995). The upshot was a growing understanding that a librarian's job was to guarantee that "all people had access to all ideas," Geller, supra, at 156, and by the end of the 1930s, librarians' "basic position in opposition to censorship [had] emerged," Krug & Harvey, ALA and Intellectual Freedom: A Historical Overview, in Intellectual Freedom Manual, pp. xi, xv (American Library Association 1974) (hereinafter Intellectual Freedom Manual); see also Darling, Access, Intellectual Freedom and Libraries, 27 Library Trends 315- 316 (1979).
4 That is, libraries do not refuse materials to adult patrons on account of their content. Of course, libraries commonly limit access on content-neutral grounds to, say, rare or especially valuable materials. Such practices raise no First Amendment concerns, because they have nothing to do with suppressing ideas.
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