Lisa Peet – Library Journal – “Although written texts often evoke strong, sometimes contentious reactions, political cartoons and caricatures can be equally incendiary. According to Barbara Jones, executive director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) of the American Library Association. (ALA), “Cartoons are a particular problem in our office—graphic novels and books with cartoons often get [verbally] attacked.” In 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a collection of 12 editorial cartoons by different artists, most of them depicting Mohammed, creating an image of whom is considered blasphemous by many in the Islamic tradition, though Persian and Turkish Muslims have a tradition of artwork depicting Mohammed that goes back hundreds of years. Jyllands-Posten had printed the cartoons, it said, to further dialogue, but the final product was offensive to many Muslims. Protests occurred in a number of Muslim countries, many turning violent. Embassies were attacked, some 200 deaths were reported, and in 2010 four men were convicted of planning a terrorist attack against the newspaper in revenge for the cartoons’ publication. The cartoons were reprinted in newspapers and magazines worldwide, including Charlie Hebdo in 2006, an act criticized by then-president Jacques Chirac as a “manifest provocation.” When Yale University Press published a book on the subject in 2009, The Cartoons That Shook the World, it included none of the cartoons themselves (and removed several other images of Mohammed as well, including a 19th-century engraving by Gustave Doré from The Divine Comedy). Yet the cartoons did indeed open up a dialog. The controversy spurred the Danish Royal Library to conduct an internal evaluation of its collection policies, concluding that coverage of Muslim communities and ethnic minorities in Denmark needed to be increased. In 2008 the Royal Library met with several Muslim organizations. At this meeting, Steen Bille Larsen, assistant to the Royal Library’s director general, told LJ, “it was discussed how to intensify the acquisition of written cultural heritage from Muslim organizations and from leading spokesmen and religious persons in Denmark. In the discussion the Royal Library underlined that a national library has obligations toward the whole nation. Therefore the activities of the library have a wide range: from collecting and preserving the output from Muslim organizations to collecting and preserving the original drawings of Danish cartoonists in the Museum of Danish Cartoon Art. The result was very positive and after the library received several prints that were not already in the collections.” In fact, the incident helped promote the inclusion of comic art in libraries worldwide. “An argument comes up that cartoons and graphic novels aren’t really worthy of being in library collections,” said Jones. “In the 21st century, that just is not true. As we saw with Charlie Hebdo…some of the most profound work is best done as illustrations, and we urge libraries to collect graphic novels and cartoons.”