Shelving Picturebooks for All-Age Readers in the Children’s Book Section: A Cautionary Tale for Pre-service Teachers, Teachers, and Librarians

Purchasing used picturebooks online is convenient and affordable. Typically, prices of used books are much less than new books and allows the purchase of multiple copies of a single picturebook to use with students in literature circles and multiple picturebooks by a single author or illustrator to create text sets. Recently, some purchases of award-winning picturebooks by the author have revealed an anomaly. The purchased picturebooks, while priced as used, were brand new, not used, not read or checked out from a library, stamped WITHDRAWN, and removed from the library shelves. This article describes and explains this anomaly and proposes a solution. It ends with some concluding thoughts for moving forward