I want to second this - public libraries are still often funded by municipalities, and those municipalities might have political concerns that mean for every book on 'liberalf topics, you have to have some Bill O’Reilly psuedo-intellectual hatemag - ethically, this follows Ranganathan’s principle of ‘every reader their book and every book their reader’, and practically allows public libraries to say 'look! We don’t censor anything - we’ve got four copies of whatever slop ben shapiro wrote, so it makes sense that we’re not gonna censor ‘all boys aren’t blue’

I would say it’s likely the old director who personally allowed the book realized this.

It’s a very loving ethos of neutrality that it’s imperative public libraries work hard to walk.