The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

This week is “Banned Books Week,” a fact being advertised at libraries and booksellers across the country. A sweet savor of past respectability still clings to the observance, which was launched in 1982. On its website, the American Library Association (ALA), which compiles lists of banned and challenged books, sports its 1953 Freedom to Read Statement: “We do not believe they [Americans] are prepared to sacrifice their heritage of a free press in order to be ‘protected’ against what others think may be bad for them. We believe they still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression.” But the globe’s political classes largely believe the opposite: The Biden administration formed an abortive “Disinformation Governance Board,” making internet censorship the work of the Department of Homeland Security. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, declared the world’s top concern was “not conflict or climate. It is disinformation and misinformation.” Brazil has shut down Twitter because of the company’s unwillingness to suppress government-deemed misinformation. France has arrested the CEO of a social media company that permits anonymous posting. And of course countries like China have established near-complete control over the flow of information on the internet.

The primary battleground is online, but censorship spills over into the retail book trade. Amazon, which controls more than half of the retail book industry in this country, famously decided to ban First Things author Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. It does, however, sell Let Harry Become Sally, Kelly Novak’s response. This is a trend. The bookshop I own sells new and used books on multiple platforms, including Amazon, and Amazon’s book bans have grown more frequent. This year, I have received twenty-four emails from Amazon informing me that they had removed listings of mine deemed “restricted content.” Some of these were absurdist computer ineptitude: I couldn’t sell an “Orchids in Bloom” journal because I had failed to designate it as a “seed or plant.” I can only conjecture that Hobbitus Ille, a Latin translation of The Hobbit, “violated community standards” due to the questionable quality of the Latin. Other bans are overtly political: Shame and Attachment Loss: The Practical Work of Reparative Therapy (a “gay conversion therapy” book); Hitler’s Table Talk; The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan; Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party; Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded; Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington; Islam Dismantled: The Mental Illness of Prophet Muhammad; and the antisemitic screed The Plot Against the Church.

These books are largely unsavory, and none are titles I would go out of my way to stock in my store. We used book dealers often acquire books by chance. But I am willing to bother with them if they are otherwise inaccessible. As the Freedom to Read Statement says: “Freedom is no freedom if it is accorded only to the accepted and the inoffensive.” In other words, I oppose book bans and am a supporter of banned books. “It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.”  

Amazon appears to be experimenting with its capacity to control the book market in increasingly invasive ways. Building an Index of Banned Books is one task. Controlling access to favored products and/or eliminating sales of used books is another: Amazon sent us an email informing us we would need approval to sell any Disney products. In February we received an email that Amazon was taking away our power to sell any book it deemed a textbook; three days later they reversed that decision. Capricious, unaccountable, controlling, partisan, expansive, greedy, tyrannical: Amazon is giving us a perfectly clear indication of how it will govern the market once its monopoly status is achieved. Watching them consolidate power day by day has convinced me of the importance of localist alternatives, both for economic well-being and personal freedom. In the past year and a half, we’ve halved our dependence on Amazon.

These kinds of concerns are far, far away, however, from the increasingly farcical iteration of Banned Books Week as we have it today. I go past the “banned books” displays of 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved and The Color Purple and have to laugh: These are the opposite of banned books. These are required books, books that have been assigned reading for American students for generations. They have enjoyed most-favored-title status in the industry from the moment of publication. They are promoted books—relentlessly promoted. Indeed, calling them banned is just the latest morph of a marketing program that hasn’t stopped wanting you to read these books for—in some instances—six or seven decades now.

“It’s not just ‘Banned Books Week,’” the librarians tell us, explaining how To Kill a Mockingbird ends up on their list, “it’s ‘Banned and Challenged Books Week.’” The ALA compiles data on complaints about library holdings, which become the “challenged” books that get dumped onto the “banned” book lists. The methodology skews the results. The most challenged books are the ones that are most promoted and available. Inaccessible books—books that librarians and booksellers choose not to hold—never get counted at all. No one is talking about Shame and Attachment Loss because it never gets into the public libraries in the first place. Numbers really go up when a book is required reading in a class, because then large numbers of resistant people (as in, students) are placed in a situation where their objections can be heard. This is how The Kite Runner or Huckleberry Finn ends up on the list. The end result of the methodology is that the most-published, most-promoted, most-assigned books, all of which represent the dominant ideology as opposed to unpopular viewpoints, end up on the “banned” lists. These lists do not represent books that are difficult to access: They represent heavily assigned books that have generated some friction. At times the friction is truly minuscule: The Washington Post reports that sixty percent of all “book ban” requests in 2022 came from eleven people. But emails from one of those eleven people will earn the book permanently marketable victim status, which makes compiling all the data worthwhile.

Politically motivated book bans are vanishingly rare in American history. Mein Kampf was being printed and sold in America while bombs were raining down on Dresden and Berlin. Current interpretation of the First Amendment declares that it does not pertain to obscene material, however, and almost all of America’s famous book bans come under obscenity statutes. It was once illegal to print, import, or sell James Joyce’s Ulysses or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer due to obscenity laws. Today this has become the hottest fight when it comes to “banned books.” The ALA notes that of the most challenged books this year, all of them—all—were challenged because they contain sexually explicit material. And in every instance, they are books marketed to minors, shelved with children’s or juvenile books or held by schools. Here once more the industry’s marketing of these as “banned” is farcical. Pornography is legal in this country, but not all parents want it in schools. For decades the ALA has objected to this position, additionally calling all forms of internet filtering in schools and libraries unacceptable censorship. I have spoken with librarians who also believe that terms like “age-appropriate” represent a form of censorship, and that children have rights to access content just like anyone else. This was almost assuredly not the intention of the original Freedom to Read Statement, that pornographic images be made available to children of any age for free at their nearest public library. But the history of obscenity laws does indicate that it is a shifting standard. The most reasonable source for such a standard would be the community itself. Hence, I think it is completely fair that the public should have a say about what books are too obscene for libraries, and too obscene for children.

But this is precisely what Banned Books Week objects to: democratic oversight and feedback applied to taxpayer-funded institutions. It markets itself as freedom and inquiry necessary for democracy, but takes the form of suppression of dissent. It stays silent about the world’s largest bookseller restricting access to content, but carefully tabulates every lone powerless individual in the country who wonders if To Kill a Mockingbird promotes the white savior complex. It has become something truly Orwellian, as can be gathered from the book lists themselves. These lists represent very accurately what teachers, librarians, and booksellers believe should be the required books for everyone, and they are working to ensure that there is a copy in every library, every school, and every bookshop. Banned means required. 

They are not willing to extend this treatment to other books. In 2021, the American Booksellers’ Association, which supports Banned Books Week, included Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters in one of its mailings to 750 member bookstores. The book had been banned by Target and challenged by more than five hundred employees at Amazon. An online frenzy erupted over the book. And yet, it somehow didn’t manage to get listed as banned or challenged. The book’s inclusion in the mailing caused a furor, and the ABA, under its current CEO Allison Hill, issued an apology: “An anti-trans book was included in our July mailing to members. This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA’s ends policies, values, and everything we believe and support. It is inexcusable.” Mere exposure to a book constitutes a “violent incident” and is “inexcusable.” The Harvard Book Store issued a statement: “We’re extremely disappointed and angered to see the ABA promoting dangerous, widely discredited anti-trans propaganda, and we’re calling for accountability.” 

The same people are celebrating Banned Books Week as I write this. Is there any reason to believe that they actually support the freedom to read, or can be trusted with it? 

John Byron Kuhner owns Bookmarx Books in Steubenville, Ohio.

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Image by Magnus Manske, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.