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California Library Hall of Fame

 Helen Elizabeth Haines (1872-1961) 

Helen Elizabeth Haines was a writer, book reviewer, library school instructor, and lecturer. Born in New York City in 1872, she moved to Southern California after contracting tuberculosis in 1907. Although not trained as a librarian, she was named managing editor of LIBRARY JOURNAL in 1896 and was elected second vice president of the American Library Association (ALA) ten years later. After moving to California, she taught book selection classes for the Library School of the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) for 12 years. She also taught at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California.

A staunch believer in the educational value of books, Haines conducted annual lecture series at LAPL, Pasadena and Long Beach public libraries, as well as University of California Extension. Perhaps her greatest contribution to the library profession, however, was her seminal work called LIVING WITH BOOKS: THE ART OF BOOK SELECTION (Columbia University, 1935), which became the definitive library school text on the subject for many years. An advocate of books as a means to opportunity, equality, and freedom, Haines embraced all reading tastes, simple as well as sophisticated.

She also was a firm believer in intellectual freedom and equal access for everyone, including Black Americans. In 1940, she was named the first chair of the California Library Association’s intellectual freedom committee—a position she held for five years. When the Los Angeles County board of supervisors required all county employees to sign a loyalty oath against communism in 1947, Haines urged ALA to oppose the mandate. They did not. Haines, therefore, rewrote the Library Bill of Rights, adding that “in no case should [book] selection be determined by . . . the political . . . views of the writer.” ALA approved her revision.

Sadly, Haines and her anti-censorship stance were vilified by librarians and non-librarians alike during the McCarthy era and so she retired from the profession in the 1950s. But not before being awarded the prestigious Joseph W. Lippincott Award for Outstanding Librarianship in 1951. Helen Haines died in 1961.

Helen Haines was inducted into the California Library Hall of Fame in 2022. For more information, please see:

Holly Crawford. Freedom Through Books: Helen Haines and Her Role in the Library Press, Library Education, and the Intellectual Freedom Movement. PhD thesis. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.

Helen E. Haines. LIVING WITH BOOKS: THE ART OF BOOK SELECTION. Columbia University Press, 1935.

“Helen E. Haines.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_E._Haines.

Photo source: Wikipedia