Ban Banned Books Week

By David Mills Published on October 5, 2015

It was the end of a very special week for freedom in America and I almost missed it. I would have been happier if I had. Unfortunately, feeling all cheery, I walked into our local library on Friday to find, just to the right of the circulation desk, right where you’d see it, a table advertising Banned Books Week. So. Our comfy suburban library stands for liberty against the narrow bigoted controlling fearful forces of literary facism. Do we see a raised fist? Do we hear a “right on”?

I’m sure this makes many people, librarians for example, feel warm and glowy inside. It makes me feel grumpy inside. I want to ban Banned Books Week.

The Usual Books

The table was loaded with books with notes on their cover from the books themselves. Among them were the usuals, like Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse 5, and the Harry Potter books. On a book titled I Hunt Killers was this note: “I was challenged in Lexington, Kentucky, for violent content.” Or this one, on Perks of a Wallflower: “I was challenged in Grandview Heights, Ohio, due to homosexuality. I have been a YA bestseller since my publication in 1999.”

And then there’s this on a graphic novel titled Bone: “I was challenged in Rosemount, Minnesota, for ‘age appropriateness,’ despite being named ‘the best all-ages graphic novel ever published’ by Time.” That one I decided to look up, because it seemed the best example of an unreasonably banned book, and I want to be fair even if I do feel grumpy.

Here’s the description of the book on the Marshall University’s library’s website (archived here):

Retained in the Rosemount (MN) elementary school libraries despite a parent’s concern that the series includes smoking, drinking, and gambling in its graphics and storylines. The series is rated suitable for fourth grade and up, has won several awards, and received positive reviews from national publications, including Time, which touted the series as the “best all-ages graphic novel ever published.”

A parent. One parent. When he complained we don’t even know. In Rosemount, Minnesota, which turns out to be a small, white, family-heavy, politically conservative middle-class suburb of the Twin Cities. So in the progressive’s idea of the reactionary paradise, exactly one parent protested against this book. And the school district kept the book in the library anyway. As threats to freedom go — not a threat.

But there it is, on the top shelf of the display, an example of the dangers of book-banning in America, and the foolishness of book-banners — I’m the best all-ages graphic novel, it tells us! There it sits on the table to shock and horrify the library’s patrons, and drive them to do . . . whatever it is that people upset when parents in other towns protest against a book do.

Manufactured Attack

If you tried to sell a cancer cure this way — hey, it worked for someone somewhere some time! — the FDA would come down on your head in a minute. But manufacture an attack on freedom from a few parents in a few towns around the country and you have banned book displays in libraries all over the country.

Let’s look at this more closely. It actually gets worst. An elementary school parent complained that Bone is not age-appropriate. This book, according to the Marshall University library, is rated “suitable for fourth grade and up.” Who rated it, they’ll be part of the book establishment, and even they believe the book isn’t appropriate for children before they reach the fourth grade.

What do you have in elementary schools? Holy cow, you have kids who haven’t reached fourth grade! You have kindergartners! Some of those kids can read, and they’re going to read a graphic novel with cute characters like Bone. First graders, ditto. Second graders, third graders, ditto.

So in this school most of the kids are too young to read Bone, according to the book establishment’s own rating system. On the book establishment’s own grounds, that parent had reason to complain.

And this was still, let’s not forget this, one parent. In one school. Once. Making, as it turns out, a reasonable request. Which was rejected. But there’s the book with the indignation-rousing note, sitting in a prominent display in this suburban library. Our tax dollars at work.

They’d Ban Books Too

Alert readers will have noticed that I haven’t even mentioned the reality that in this library, Banned Books Week display notwithstanding, the librarian would ban a vast number of books in a second, and often rightly so. Were the librarian to find in the stacks a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the original version of Little Black Sambo, or one of those faux-serious books of “revisionist” holocaust denial, she’d yank it off the shelves as fast as that poor parent in Rosemount, Minnesota.

She wouldn’t have to do anything with Tintin in the Congo. The Brooklyn Public Library locked that one in a back room as too racist to leave on the shelves. But Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library system doesn’t even have a copy. It has every other book in the series, but not that one. It’s a banned book. But it’s funny: It’s not on the table with its peers.

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