Pulling weeds

The other day while going through our collection looking for books for a summer display I started randomly pulling out those annoying little paperbacks that keep popping up like chickweed wherever I go. They are in our picture books. They are in our easy readers. They are in our J Fiction collection and yes they are most abundant in our graphic novel collection. So what is a children's librarian's best defense against proliferation? Make a new collection out of the annoyances, give them a pretty spine sticker, and give them their own shelf. If you're lucky (and we're not) you assign them their own collection code so you will be able to say aha! when a patron comes and asks you what JSPEC means. That you tell the patron refers to our sinner-manga collection--that amalgam of books created from movies and T.V. that now accounts for about 60% of our graphic novel collection. You see what happened was that I began to pull the skinny paperback annoyances like the Narnia Tea with Tumnus, Charlotte's Web, Ice Age, Chicken Little, Cars etc., and then I began to rethink the breadth of what I was doing. I thought about That's So Raven and Lizzy McGuire that are in our series collection. What about Scooby Doo? He's in series, mystery and graphic novels. Then there's Kim Possible. Dora and Spongebob already have their special spot in our "Favorites" collection. Superman and Batman are everywhere. All the Disney movie storybooks. Ohmygosh I am Micky Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice. The scariest movie bit ever. SIGH. I feel like a hostage in a Cathy comic strip. My solution? Take a long weekend and plant a garden.