“Truly, each book is as a ship that bears us away from the fixity of our limitations into the movement and splendor of life’s infinite ocean.”
-Helen Keller
Books can be always at your side and at your beck and call. Books hold thoughts that entreat you to listen and help you to remember. They are ready in an instant to amuse, entertain, guide, and inform you. They hold within their covers the passions, arguments, dreams, struggles, opinions, laughter, gaiety, tears, anxieties, folly, and wisdom of the race of humans. They evoke sympathy, empathy, anger, disagreement, probing and disturbing thought—often truth that is difficult to hear. They are counsellors, guides, interpreters, entertainers, and servants. For that reason, books are honored, appreciated, even revered, and more importantly, remembered.
Books themselves—being inanimate objects—know neither time nor space and yet they persist so long as they can be physically or digitally protected or are enshrined in memory. Their breadth stretches backward into the mists of ancient history, cast light on the fleeting life of the present, and give insight into the coming future. Whether in print or electronic form, books can take readers back to great cities long gone or to allow deep speculation about the vastness of the future to come—the travel, the perils, the sense of adventure, and the human costs and potential benefits.
Books constitute the first insights into knowledge of the world around them for children, and become the treasured companions of the aged and infirm by stretching their horizons or evoking memories of times, places, and persons from the past. Books have an heroic character: many were written at the risk of the lives of the authors. They have been and still are the treasure trove of knowledge about the deepest oceans and jungles, the stories told by rocks, nature of the depths and of the poles of the earth, descriptions of how nature and life works. They hold the thinking of philosophers, scientists, religionists, activists, apologists, the moods of the introspective, the calls to action of the extroverts, the struggles to put forth ideas, the nonsense of fools, and the siren call of knaves.
Many books form in the minds of men and women and never get written—what a waste. Many more books get written and never published or published and never gain an audience—what a sadness for all of that effort. There is much to be learned and appreciated from the stories of unknown novelists, the bleeding emotions of unread poets, the revelations of unappreciated prophets, and the carefully crafted essays and blogposts of legions of thinkers whose works never reach the public sufficiently widely enough to gain traction. What those works contain–like those that are widely read—are more often than not the keys to success and happiness, the satisfaction of hopes and curiosities, and the wisdom of statesmen and philosophers and gurus.
For all of the lovers of books, the obverse is also true. Many books have been feared, even hated. Books have fomented revolutions, excited change, challenged the status quo, righted long held prejudices and powerfully believed oppressive traditions. They have shaken the foundations of societies. Individual books and indeed, whole libraries, have been desecrated, effaced, and destroyed. For as long as the written word has existed, it has been a target for censorship. Religion has been the most frequent enemy of the written word and the most often used reason to invoke censorship. In 14th century England, reading the Wycliff Bible was forbidden by the clergy for fear that the translation had corrupted or misinterpreted the original text even though that text had a long history of erroneous copying and translations. In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church placed Machiavelli’s The Prince on its “banned absolutely” category because of its heretical content. American books including Judy Blume’s Forever, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings have been challenged by parents and school boards who deem certain sexual passages inappropriate for young people. Works such as It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris and Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman, among others, frequently face demands for removal from library shelves for their focus on gay/lesbian issues with their associated religious and political implications. Even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz, and many others have been challenged by dozens of parents, administrators, and clergy for their scary, violent or occult themes and removed from school libraries. In Utah and several states of the Confederate South, books on sex education have been severely censored or removed entirely. Books on race from any point of view and same-sex relationships and marriage have been roundly condemned and banned. Books as famous as Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut have been challenged or banned due to objections to profanity.
The taboos surrounding sex as a topic of discussion or of writing have resulted in serious challenges for centuries. Books as varied as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Maureen Johnson’s The Bermudez Triangle, and James Joyce’s Ulysses have been challenged by parents, school boards, and churches who deem certain sexual passages inappropriate for young or even people. Works such as It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris and Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman, among others, face continuing demands for removal for their frank discussion and focus on gay/lesbian issues. Objective scientific works on Evolution are still being challenged and banned from conservative church schools and libraries. Books describing the destructiveness of global warming meet with disdain and censorship in conservative religious and political sections of the United States.
Objections to violent content are often based on the idea that these works trivialize violence or desensitize readers to its effects—including One Fat Summer by Robert Lypsyte and Native Son by Richard Wright. Religious grounds have a long and tortured history as excuses for censoring books. Reading translations of the Bible was once forbidden; only the KJV was acceptable. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries and even today, parents and ministers object to works which discuss topics such as sex, evolution, witchcraft, or occult themes on religious grounds. There was a time when Jewish writings were deemed evil; and today, Islamic writings are similarly viewed in parts of the Western world. Non Islamic writings are censored and banned in Islamic countries with jihadic fervor.
They burned or destroyed the Alexandrian library in Egypt; the Celsus library in Ephesus, Turkey; the University of Sankore, an ancient seat of Muslim learning in Sankore, Timbuktu; the library in Timgad, Algeria with its 3,000 priceless scrolls; the archives of Hattusa, Anatolia with the largest collection of Hittite texts ever known–approximately thirty thousand inscribed cuneiform tablets; the great Library of Pergamum, Bergama, Turkey with its 200,000 Hellenist volumes; the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books and burying of scholars under China’s Qin Dynasty, the destruction of Aztec codices by Itzcoatl; In 1244, as an outcome of the Disputation of Paris, twenty-four carriage loads of Talmuds and other Jewish religious manuscripts were set on fire in the streets of Paris; Anthony Comstock‘s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved. Comstock’s total accomplishment in a long and influential career is estimated to have been the destruction of some 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing such ‘objectionable’ books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures; on 10 May 1933, in an act of ominous significance, students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of “un-German”—Jewish, intellectual, works of foreigners, pacifist text, Darwinism, decadent (pacifist) art—books and subsequently destroying 80% of Poland’s libraries, thereby presaging an era of uncompromising state censorship; Judaica collection at Birobidzhan by Stalin—over the course of his reign, hundreds of millions of condemned volumes or “anti-Soviet” literature were destroyed.
Nonetheless, every attempt to suppress information and knowledge by banning or destroying books has failed. The despots, extremists, fanatics, and the ignorant cannot succeed forever because books live on in the minds of mankind. They will live forever and new ones will inexorably be produced to replace the old. Ideas cannot be extinguished; books are in effect embalmed minds, able to be exhumed and reexamined.