Weeding Casualties

MAYBE THE UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG (then United College) should have held on to this first edition of Manuel Arguilla's How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories (1940), if only its library weeder foresaw the close to 80K Pinoys that would later call its city home. Weeding a collection is a tricky task dictated by a number of factors, poor circulation and plain ignorance among them, and unfortunately the book had no library due date card when it arrived to give me an idea of its circulation history. Mabel Cook Cole's Philippine Folk Tales (1916) from the USC library had the same fate, but maybe books such as these are better off safeguarded in a private library.