![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
It’s Banned Books Week in the US, an annual event promoted by the American Library Association, where librarians take a break from shushing and congratulate themselves for fighting the good fight against age-appropriate reading material.
It’s fitting that this year’s visual theme is piracy, as libraries themselves are veritable Aladdin’s Caves of copyright abuse, blatantly encouraging their customers to read the books cover to cover, even take them home, without paying a cent up front — all the while generating fat profits from “late fees”, which can run to several dollars, depending on how many months pass before you find the book again under the couch and guilt yourself into returning it.
Readers outside the US may be surprised to know that America’s little flirtation with democracy back in the 1770’s spawned a subculture of special interest groups, full of fundamentalist nutbags and politically correct DoubleThinkers who believe it is their obligation to get elected to their local school boards so they can tell librarians that salacious word-porn like Catcher in the Rye shouldn’t be available to children who haven’t been fully indoctrinated into their parents’ worldview yet. In the more enlightened European nations, like Australia, we have virtually done away with such interest groups, trusting in the entropic force of government bureaucracy to make the process of objecting to library books so onerous (and devoid of public soapboxing) that only the most media-friendly soundbite protest has any chance of success.
The Banned Books campaign’s public message is opposition to censorship — their tagline is “Free People Read Freely”, which they’ve registered as a trademark so you can’t use it freely — but the real message is Trust Your Librarian. Apparently, letting the government or special interest groups dictate what books are or aren’t available in your local library is “censorship”, but letting the librarian decide is called “selection”.
It’s an important distinction, because while people may organise local opposition to local pressure to ban a certain book from a local library, there is no national campaign to throw open the floodgates and ensure that every book is available at every library. With limited buying budgets, and the constant pressure to justify the library’s existence by stocking the kind of populist nonsense that people actually want to read, librarians must balance their desire to build the New Library of Alexandria in Cowpoke, Iowa, with the very real problem that they don’t have time to read, let alone consult the public over most of the new titles they order.
Librarians want the selection process to be completely opaque, not because they relish the unchecked power to shape the reading habits of the tiny percentage of the population who use the local library, but because attending local council meetings to debate the literary merits versus subtle homosexual agenda of a 24-page children’s book is a fsckin’ waste of time.
The proponents of Banned Books Week would like to encourage you to mark the occasion by (re)reading a book that was banned at some point but is now freely available, ostensibly to celebrate the moral victory of elegantly written smut over mindless prudishness. If you’re going to do this, though, do it in style — skip Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, and go straight for Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. This will serve several purposes:
I would advise against borrowing any Sade from a local library, if indeed you can find one, because the pages are likely to be so encrusted with stains of a dubious nature that the FBI could use it as a DNA database.
If you support Banned Books Week, there are several web badges on their website that you can display on your blog. Here’s another one you can use, courtesy of me:
If, however, you believe that books aren’t banned often enough, here’s an image you can use:
I think you know which one I’m using.