Ban A Good Book Lately?

The last week in September is the one set aside by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the Association of American Publishers to draw attention to the issue of of book censorship through Banned Books Week. The DACC library has set up a display to raise awareness of the issue in the hallway in Clock Tower. The display shows copies of each of the 10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2009 as well as focusing on an especially current hot topic: book burning.

Burning books is the ultimate method of attempting to control history and controversial or opposing ideas -- literally scorching them from the face of the earth. When asked about people who burn books, we in the United States typically think of the Nazis and the great public bonfires of books they held prior to World War II (as documented in this University of Arizona Library online display). But book burning has happened on many occasions since then as well. Some of the more famous, or infamous, incidents are detailed in the article from the CBC.

People in the United States often like to think that we don't engage in such things, but actually there have been several popularly supported book burnings in U.S. history. The one with arguably the farthest reaching consequences was crusade against and mass burnings of comic books in 1948. The attack on comic books as degenerate literature virtually destroyed the industry, which had been robust with the success of Superman, horror and crime comics previously. It would be decades before the industry regained any real legitimacy, and it is only with the development of the "graphic novel" that adult readers have begun to recognize the form as an acceptable reading alternative. Another incidents that enjoyed significant support in certain sections of the population were the removal of works identified as "pro-Communist" by Roy Cohn and David Schine, Joseph McCarthy's primary aides, from U.S. State Department libraries. Authors and works swept under this heading included everyone from Dashiell Hammett, the creator of detective Sam Spade, to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Some librarians went so far as to burn the suspect authors.

So just for fun to celebrate this week, test yourself with Banned and Challenged Books Quiz which asks you to guess whether particular books were merely challenged (the much more common action) or actually banned.