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Librarian Fined for Promoting Daughter's OEL Manga
posted on by Mikhail Koulikov
Robert Grandt, a librarian at New York City's prestigious Brooklyn Technical High School, has been fined US$500 by the city's Conflicts of Interest Board after he promoted the recently released Shakespeare's Macbeth: The Manga Edition, a CliffsNotes-style summary of the play that his daughter Eve Grandt illustrated. Grandt highlighted the book in a library newsletter and set up a display that called it "the best book ever written" inside the library.
The Conflicts of Interest Board, which is charged with overseeing the rules on ethical conduct of city public servants, found that Grandt, as a city employee, was in violation of section 2604(b)(3) of the New York City charter. The section stipulates that "No public servant shall use or attempt to use his or her position as a public servant to obtain any financial gain, contract, license, privilege, or other private or personal advantage, direct or indirect, for the public servant or any person or firm associated with the public servant."
In addition to the fine, Grandt was required to sign a disposition acknowledging the violation and waiving his rights to file an appeal.
The Manga Editions line, which Wiley launched in February, also includes guides to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. Takes on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are both due out in February. Each volume is illustrated by a different artist and overseen by Parsons School of Design professor Adam Sexton.
The series is not related to the Manga Shakespeare line from Britain's SelfMadeHero comics publishing house. Those books place the heroes and plots of Shakespeare's plays into modern, science fiction, and fantasy settings.
Source: New York Times
