In aggressively keeping with reader preferences, Fairfax County Libraries are going one step further by discarding books that have not been checked out in the past twenty-four months. Along with books such as Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, The Education of Henry Adams, and Emily Dickinson’s Final Harvest, thousands of novels and nonfiction works are being eliminated from the shelves. Sam Clay, the director of the twenty-one-branch system since 1982 said, “We’re being very ruthless. A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.” Library officials do say that they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, The Great Gatsby, and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week. Classics such as Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are among the titles that haven’t been checked out in two years and could be eliminated. Librarians so far have decided to keep them. There are no national standards on weeding public library collections.