I will never forget when I first learned about hostility between public and academic librarians: the first week or so of library school, when a number of public-librarians-to-be complained loud and long about how horrible and snobby academic librarians were. I was then (and remain now) appalled by it. I grew up loving libraries of all kinds, and having respect for all of them. Library school didn’t change that, but it did teach me some some sad lessons about myopia and prejudice.
The genre-v.-literary debate is fraught in different ways, but fundamentally I see little difference between it and the situation I describe above. The war has been fought for so long that its origins are forgotten, or at least meaningless. There point of the war is the war. It will only end if we stop looking for insult, stop counting our scars, stop picking scabs.
J. T. Glover 