Scientology is Obsessed with Getting Books in Libraries — Here Are the Real Stats!

Hey, gang. We received a very interesting communication recently from a librarian in Illinois, and we can’t wait for you to read what he sent us.

We’ve heard from librarians several times in the past because of Scientology’s incessant efforts to get the books of L. Ron Hubbard into libraries that generally don’t want them. But that hasn’t stopped the church, particularly in the last year as it made a major push for the new “RON” encyclopedia (pictured, right).

We saw mailer after mailer begging church members to donate money so the L. Ron Hubbard Series could be put in every library on earth — it was presented like a countdown. According to those mailers, by now you’d expect thousands of copies of that encyclopedia to be in every lending book institution from Milan to Minsk.

You remember, we were inundated with images like this as the church madly pushed for donations to put the encyclopedias everywhere…

 
With that in mind, here’s what we received from “J.W.”…

I am a processor at a public library in Illinois. Our director recently got a free Bridge Publications book and we got into an argument about it. I didn’t want to process the book. I told her if we should have their books, we should also have books critical of Scientology. Her reply was that those books aren’t free but this one was. We are a smaller library so our budget doesn’t let us get the widest selection of books possible, especially books about religion. I decided that I would write to ex-Scientology authors and critics to see if they would help.

So far I have received books from Jefferson Hawkins, Amy Scobee, Nancy Many, Marty Rathbun, and Marc Headley. I was curious about how many books published by Bridge Publications were in libraries compared to the number of books critical of Scientology. WorldCat indexes library catalogs worldwide, so you can see how many libraries have a particular book. I made a list of as many Scientology books and books critical of it and began to calculate the numbers. Worldwide, there were 47,008 Scientology books in libraries and only 10,411 books critical of it. Those numbers don’t include all of the VHS tapes, DVDs, and audiobooks. Because WorldCat is not publicly searchable, these numbers aren’t widely known.

Our librarian friend J.W. supplied the following breakdown for us. First up, Scientology’s own volumes, which of course are all either written by, or about, one man — L. Ron Hubbard. Let’s see what the numbers are.

Qty

 
The L. Ron Hubbard Series (RON: The Encyclopedia, 2012)

 
Oh, my. After all of the fundraising, less than 400 sets of the RON encyclopedias in libraries around the world? Tsk, tsk. One wonders what all that money paid for.

 
Now, we turn our attention to the books about Scientology, written by various bitter defrocked apostates and merchants of chaos.

Qty

 
Some of these books were sued out of existence by the Church of Scientology. But thanks to the Internet, we can read Malko or Cooper or Kaufman even though their works were made unavailable through litigation. Major publishers behind Reitman, Wright, and Jenna Hill have resulted in large numbers for those books.

Dianetics and some of the other key Hubbard books are still widely available, but those Ron Encyclopedia numbers are really shocking. How many people who were hit up for donations to put those volumes in every library on earth will see these numbers? And how many will care?

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on August 15, 2013 at 07:00

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