Have you ever wondered who is influential in bringing new books to the shelves? 
The answer might surprise you:
It’s you, the reader!

Customer service officer and one of Bibliotheek Neude’s collection specialists,
Marc Conraads,
tells us about the impact of our reading habits – and about queer books and where he finds them.

“We are customer driven – we look at how many books are on loan, and the more books are loaned, the more money I get. So if you borrow a lot of queer books, I get more money for queer books, for instance”, says Marc Conraads, who is responsible for aquiring literary works.

“We get a lot of book requests from patrons. And then most of the time, we buy them.”
Picture by Bas van Setten.

“Yesterday I bought one after a tip from a patron who wanted a book about asexuality in English. Two months ago we got a new queer fantasy book someone asked for: two lesbian girls having adventures. And two years ago, there was a title called Confetti Rain, by a queer author and son of a famous Dutch author, and it was a huge success in the Netherlands. I had to buy 50 copies, I think, for 13 branches. 50 copies! And that’s quite a lot for a small novel, when even of the most popular books, we tend to need 100 or 120 copies…”

“Diversity is one of our main pillars of the library. Queer books, by queer authors and about queer people are quite popular, so every queer book I get my hands on, I buy. Usually, we buy from NBD Biblion, which supplies the books to most public libraries, with etiquettes on and ready to go. But they don’t have a lot of English books or from small publishers”.

Reaching for queer books at Utrecht’s Bibliotheek Neude.

“Most of the requests are for books in English, which we have, but not a lot. A lot of requests for books are about the Black Lives Matter movement, and LGBTIQA issues. And fantasy books are also very requested – young adult fantasy is the most popular by far, with a lot of young readers. I’m a fantasy fan myself”, he adds, smiling.

So, how did you solve this?

“That’s where Savannah Bay comes in: they have a huge collection about LGBTIQA issues. It started with non fiction books. About three years ago, me and my colleague Jan ten Ham, who is responsible for non fiction, talked about getting new books”.

One step closer to finding queer books in Utrecht!

Choosing books in Savannah Bay.

In 2019, Marc and Jan turned to the self proclaimed last feminist bookstore of the Netherlands, which happens to be right around the corner. “We knew Savannah Bay had a special collection and we thought, well, let’s try! We went there, looked at books, and we asked them if they could supply us with a list of books for our library. I think we bought 100 or 200 books at once, most of them non fiction and in English, which we otherwise couldn’t have added to the collection. We respect their specialist knowledge, and without them we would miss a lot of titles. We also have a colleague at the library who works as a volunteer in Savannah Bay, and they sometimes give us tips!”

Tips from Tilburg

“We have a collaboration with the collection specialist on Diversity and Inclusion from Tilburg, Anouk Jacobs. She wrote a critical report on the state of Diversity in the book collections, and she made a list of 300 LGBTQ books from around the world which she sent to several libraries in the Netherlands.

Queer books and where to find them in Utrecht’s library?

“Most of the people who come to the library for queer books know what they want”, says Marc and admits: “We have discussed marking these books to make them visible, but we don’t want to label them, and we don’t want to label the people, you know? We don’t have a special LGBTQ+collection, because we think queer books should be normal. At certain times we have them on display, but they are just part of our normal collection shows”.

A book display at the Bibliotheek Neude, showing the latest arrivals.

Marc’s suggestion is to look at the new book displays to browse and stumble upon new books. “We also do posts on Instagram, Facebook, and every month we have topics we want to make more popular. Sometimes that’s LGBTIQA books, sometimes it’s Black Lives Matter. Searching the collection using search terms like queer and lhbtq will return some results. You could find a queer fantasy novel in our catalogue if you searched right.”