Swimsuit Issue Makes Waves

"It's gotten way too graphic over the last few years, so we won't put it out," says Sharon Brown, a librarian at Redlands High School, in San Bernardino County, CA. Lynn Reid, a librarian at Blue Springs (MO) High School, tucks the swimsuit issue inside a cabinet, rather than display it on a shelf. "It's there, but it's not there," Reid told the Kansas City Star.

Others simply throw the magazine out, including Dianne Abel, a library coordinator at Newman High School in Wausau, WI, who doesn't feel models in skimpy swimsuits are appropriate content for a school library. Barbara Jeffus, California state school library consultant, doesn't like the idea that some school officials are flirting with censorship by marking over swimsuit models' private parts with a pen before allowing the issue into libraries.

But for Kathy McIntire, a librarian at Denton (TX) High School, the issue doesn't usually present a problem. That's because most of the time it's stolen from the mail room before it even reaches her desk.

Sports Illustrated reports that its weekly readership of 21 million spikes to 50 million with the release of the swimsuit edition, which has been published as an extra issue of the magazine for the last 39 years.

Ann Cothran, a media specialist at Carolina High School in Greenville, SC, displays the magazine in her library, but wouldn't do so in a middle school. Those kids can't "handle looking at the Guinness Book of World Records," she told the Greenville News.