If you believe age-inappropriate reading material is stuff that is not just beyond kids’ reading comprehension but is harmful to them, I present myself for a case study. As a young schoolkid, perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library. Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She saw that I was a reader and perhaps knew that there were few books in my house. She seemed also to understand that there was little left for me to explore in the children’s section of the Mead Public Library.

One day after school, Miss Dahlberg took me downtown and talked with the librarians. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Even so, what had been rigid rules for the library were no match for Ebba Dahlberg. I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges. (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me as we left the library that it would not matter.. She also told me to keep secret that I now had access to the entire library.)

This was not something that was part of her duties, but it opened up worlds for me. I have always appreciated it. As an adult, I found Miss Dahlberg’s address in the upstate town where she had retired and wrote her a letter thanking her. She probably had no idea who I was. However, in her reply she was grateful that I remembered that she wrote on the blackboard with yellow chalk, which she purchased from her own funds. She used the yellow because she thought it stood out better and students could see it better.

This golden library card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading and gave me entrée to all the age-inappropriate materials the library housed. I did not return to the children’s section even though I had not in fact exhausted it. Only as an adult did I read such classics as Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.

I had no direction in my exploration of the adult library. I had no method for finding what to check out other than walking through the stacks, glancing at jacket copy, reading a few paragraphs or pages, and then using gut intuition to take out books.

I remember little of what I read from these directionless days, and that seems significant. If books were too shocking for my adolescent sensibilities, if they exposed me to harmful content, if in some way they damaged me, I should recall those books. I remember only two.

The first was The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove. Like that movie, it also encouraged my emerging views that the powerful -– whether military, political, corporate, or social -– were not to be trusted. If I had then talked with anybody about books, I would have insisted they read it. Surely there are some uptight people who would have tried to prevent me from reading these books, claiming they were age inappropriate, because they were “subversive.” They got readers to question the existing order. I can’t imagine that these books were harmful to me unless there is something wrong with learning about the power and fun of good satire. Of course, I may not yet have learned a basic fact about satire as put by Jonathan Swift: “Satire, being leveled at all, is never resented for an offense by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand it of others.”

The other book I remember from my adult privileges was not a random encounter as was The Mouse. I don’t know how I had heard of From Here to Eternity by James Jones (perhaps because the 1953 movie caused such a stir), but I sought it out. Not finding it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library in that staid period, I learned that the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by letting him leave the library with this book. I insisted, however, that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

Eternity was the first adult book that mesmerized me. I don’t know why the book was behind the counter, but I assume that it had something to do with adulterous sex. I don’t even remember that. While the sprawling narrative was captivating, it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Was I harmed by this age-inappropriate book? I don’t remember the sex. Was it explicit? If so, I didn’t understand it. Instead, I felt that the book helped me grow because the Prewitt character talked to me as I closed in on the teenage years of alienation.

If reading age-inappropriate stuff harms kids, I must have been mightily damaged. Perhaps if you get to know me you will spot all the ways I was harmed. But that is not how I feel about my experience. I would have been much more damaged if I had not had stuff to read. To restrict me to the exhausted children’s library would have produced boredom and alienation. Education should be a time of exploration, and we should never deny children that opportunity.