Despite the objections of more than a dozen Greensboro, North Carolina, residents and a rash of negative newspaper articles, Greensboro library trustees have decided to keep Playboy magazine in the collection. The board’s unanimous November 22 vote also affirmed the decision of Director Sandy Neerman to move the magazine back behind the circulation desk, rather than the open-shelving status the title got when the library moved into its new, more spacious building last year. The title is available to adults by request.
“They saw it as an intellectual-freedom issue, but they also took seriously the attitudes of the community in which we live,” Neerman said in the November 23 Greensboro News and Record. “I got half of what I wanted,” reacted Christina Tolbert, who filed a complaint in August that the magazine is morally offensive. “I’m disappointed, but I’m glad that it’s off the shelves, and I’m glad that I got to have my say.”
Posted November 29, 1999.