The Yearly Charade of "Banned Books Week"

Photo by Markus Clemens on Unsplash

If you, like me, are a resident of the United States and visit your local library frequently, you will have noticed that every year your library will do some sort of observance of the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week.” Likely there will be a display of “banned books” in the library and on its social media. Obviously, the books are not actually banned, since they are on display at your local library. So, the point of the exercise seems to be to convey the following message:

What a lucky person, you, our patron, are! You live in a place where everyone is against censorship (unlike those strange people in other locations and times who are always going around censoring as if they have nothing better to do). Hurray for us and hurray for you!

I never really paid much attention to the books that were on display, and I more or less believed the message that was conveyed. I was not particularly interested in reading the books just because someone, somewhere, at some time had wanted to “ban” them. But I did believe that it was nice that I didn’t have to deal with that tiresome sort of “banning” nonsense. 

Then I served several years as a trustee of my local public library and I got a chance to look behind the curtain and I caught just a glimpse of the vertically integrated censorship apparatus of which public libraries are a component. 

The first time someone said that one of the jobs of a library was to “combat misinformation” I agreed enthusiastically. “After all,” I thought, “don’t libraries by their very nature combat misinformation? Libraries stand almost in direct opposition to the vapid, banal, intellectually stunted clickbait that is everywhere on the internet. Libraries have old books and new books, books about all sorts of subjects, addressed from all different viewpoints. Sometimes these books are fascinating and have profound explanatory power, and sometimes they don’t, but who really cares about that? At least they are there, for anybody to check out and learn from.”

Then I learned that I had been ignorant all along, and that I just had not understood the new vocabulary, even though the rule is very simple: When the self-appointed good people censor, they call it “combatting misinformation” or “preventing harm”, because they know they are good people, with good motives, doing good. These self-appointed good people label most actions other groups take, so long as they have anything to do with books, “censorship”.  And that is the whole rule; anybody can learn it.

I decided to investigate the statistics that the ALA (American Library Association) had on “book bans”; I found that there was no genuine and reliable data to back up their statistical assertions. The ALA, as it turns out, had mostly just been collating clickbait articles. Libraries were not and are not required to retain or submit original records of book re-evaluation requests. By law, these records could have been and can be discarded at any time. The ALA cries “censorship,” and makes lists of the most “challenged” books, but really, nobody has or can have any accurate knowledge.

I also discovered that libraries were not and are not required to keep records over time of their collections. Libraries must weed regularly to maintain their collections. There was not and is not any mechanism to prevent or to detect the covert censorship of politically motivated weeding which certainly occurs.

I made lists of cancelled people-authors whose careers or livelihoods or lives had been endangered and lists of cancelled books-books that had been pulled from publication or had not been written at all because the author had been pressured to withdraw a book or because the publisher had refused to

publish or because a book had been removed from a distribution service. I made lists of books that were not available in any of the libraries in my local library consortium. And I made lists of books that were not available from any library in my entire state. There were a lot of missing books.

And then I began to make purchase requests of some of these missing books at my local libraries and I had a pleasant surprise. With a few rare and disedifying exceptions, the librarians in charge of purchasing decided to make the purchases I had requested. I drew a heartening conclusion: there was reason to be hopeful. Despite the lengthy list of missing books which appeared to indicate the presence of bias and censorship, when presented with a direct request from a member of the public many librarians were still fulfilling their professional responsibility to fill those requests. That so many books that captured wide public interest were not part of the collections already was concerning, but at least there was still a way to have those books get included in the collection. Perhaps, while some librarians were embracing the role of censor and political activist, many still knew and performed their proper role: to serve their communities in a neutral and non-partisan way.

Recently however, I became aware of an outrageous injustice that all but destroyed my optimism. Cathy Simpson, CEO of the Niagara-on-the-Lake public library in Canada, was abruptly and summarily fired for expressing in two brief essays her commitment to those professional principles that enable librarians to properly serve their communities. And from that I draw a disturbing conclusion: Her sin was not to adhere to these principles; several of the librarians in my area seem to be managing that in a quiet way and they have not been summarily fired for it. Her sin was to make her convictions about her professional duties public and to draw attention to the existence of the censorship apparatus and the part that public libraries play within it.

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