print censorship

This page considers the censorship of books and libraries. 

It covers -

• introduction
• mechanisms
• the ancien regime
• totalitarian print
• Australia
• other countries
• censorship and libraries
• textbooks
• book burning

There is a valuable historical overview in Jonathan Coopersmith's 1998 paper on Pornography, Technology, and Progress (PDF).

     introduction

Milton's 1644 Areopagitica commented that "He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself".

For those interested in censorship of books we recommend Edward de Grazia's engagingly written - and for the moment definitive - Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity & the Assault on Genius (New York: Random 1992). 

Dr Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England & America (Boston: Godine 1992) is Noel Perrin's account of sanitising literature from Shakespeare and the Bible - all that horrid violence! - through to Dr Doolittle (seething with political incorrectness). Sex, Laws & Cyberspace: Freedom & Censorship on the Frontiers of the Online Revolution (New York: Holt 1997) by Jonathan Wallace & Mark Mangan is a readable account of US online smut-busting in the early 1990s. 

     mechanisms

Print censorship has typically involved use of one or more of the following mechanisms -

• restricting access to print technologies - for example Soviet practice of keeping photocopiers under lock and key to prevent samizdat publishing
• registration of publishers, printers and authors - encouraging self censorship (publishers will be wary of the heterodox in case that leads to withdrawal of a licence, printers will be wary of infringements that result in confiscation of their equipment) and facilitating monitoring by government agencies
• prohibitions on distribution and ownership of works, including criminal sanctions against possession
• disruption of distribution mechanisms - for example seizure of works from bookshops and libraries, surveillance of postal mail, confiscation of works at borders by customs or other officials
• stigmatisation of works and authors - including black lists (such as the Roman Catholic Index) and public book burnings
• exclusion of works from public libraries and educational curricula

     the ancien regime

For ancien regime censorship consult Robert Darnton's studies such as The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1982) and The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769-1789 (New York: Norton 1995), Elizabeth Eisenstein's Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992), Robert Dawson's Confiscations at customs: banned books and the French booktrade during the last years of the Ancien régime (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 2006) and Jean Goulemot's less incisive Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature & Its Readers in 18th Century France (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 1994).

Seize the Book, Jail the Author: Johann Lorenz Schmidt & Censorship in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ashland: Purdue Uni Press 2001) by Paul Spalding is complemented by Ole Christiansen's paper on Absolutism and Freedom of Expression: An Account of Denmark as it was in the Years 1661-1848 and two studies by Cyndia Clegg: Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1997) and Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001).

Censorship & the Control of Print in England & France 1600-1910 (New Castle: Oak Knoll 1992), edited by Robin Myers & Michael Harris, and The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity & the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone 1993) edited by Lynn Hunt are of particular value. Donald Thomas' A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (London: Routledge 1969) is less substantial and might be supplemented by works such as Jeffrey Weeks' Sex, Politics & Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman 1981).

Iain McCalman's Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1988), Julie Peakman's Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2003), Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (London: Faber 2001) and James Nelson's Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State Uni Press 2000) offer another perspective.

For the Chatterley case see H Montgomery Hyde's The Lady Chatterley's Lover Trial (London: Bodley Head 1990), CH Rolph's The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v Penguin Books Limited (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1961) and Books in the Dock (London: Deutsch 1969) and Charles Rembar's The End of Obscenity: the trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill (London: Deutsch 1965).

A sense of continuities and contrasts with soviet censorship is provided by studies of the Tsarist red pencil. As a point of entry we recommend consultation of Censorship in Russia, 1865-1905 (Lanham: Uni Press of America 1979) by Daniel Balmuth, A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas Under the Czars (Duke Uni Press 1985) by Marianna Choldin and Fighting Words: The Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906 (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1982) by Charles Ruud.

Paul Boyer's study in Purity In Print (New York: Scribners 1968) of the US crusade against smut in the first half of last century has aged like a fine wine. It is particularly incisive on Anthony Comstock, founder of the US Society for the Suppression of Vice, who boasted that 194,000 "questionable pictures" and 134,000 pounds of books of "improper character" were destroyed under the 'Comstock Law' in 1873-4 alone.

Its promoter - known for jeremiads depicting pornography as a "moral vulture" that "steals upon our youth in the home, school and college, silently striking its terrible talons into their vitals and forcibly bearing them away on hideous wings to shame and death" - is considered in Nicola Beisel's elegant Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock & Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1997), complemented by Leigh Wheeler's Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2004).

Other accounts of moral panics - and publisher responses - include Soft Core: Moral Crusades Against Pornography in Britain & America (London: Cassell 1994) by Bill Thompson, Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800-1930 (Aldershot: Scolar Press 1993) by Peter Mendes, Bookleggers & Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 1999) by Jay Gertzman and The Good Ship Venus: The Erotic Voyages of the Olympia Press (London: Hutchinson 1994) by John de St Jorre.

Associated studies are noted in our profile on Print, the Book and Reading.

     totalitarian print

For print censorship in the USSR an overview is provided by Herman Ermolaev's Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917-1991 (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield 1996).

Particular issues are explored in more depth in The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (Boston: Unwin Hyman 1989) edited by Marianna Choldin & Maurice Friedberg and Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Society Literary, Theatre & Film Arts in the 1930's (Evanston: Northwestern Uni Press 2002) edited by Katherine Eaton. The KGB's Literary Archive (London: Harvill Press 1997) by Vitaly Shentalinsky describes the resurrection of confiscated manuscripts by authors such as Babel and Bulgakov.

For the Third Reich and Fascist Italy see Public libraries in Nazi Germany (Tuscaloosa: Uni of Alabama Press 1992) by Margaret Stieg, Jane Dunnett's Foreign Literature in Fascist Italy: Circulation and Censorship (PDF), Guido Bonsaver's Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 2007) and his Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy (Oxford: Legenda 2005) with Robert Gordon.

In discussing contemporary censorship in the People's Republic of China Perry Link uses the image of the anaconda in the chandelier. Writers work under a chandelier in which dwells a huge anaconda. Occasionally its tail drops down to crush a victim but much activity is ignored by the snake. No serious effort is made to explain the situation or to disguise its menace. 'You decide' is the snake's message to writers and publishers, with uncertainty its most powerful weapon.

     Australia

The history of Australian literary censorship is explored in detail in a separate profile elsewhere on this site.

Useful introductions are provided by Peter Coleman's Obscenity, Blasphemy & Sedition: The Rise & Fall of Literary Censorship in Australia (Potts Point: Duffy & Snellgrove 2000) is a reprint of the entertaining 1960 study by the conservative politician. There's a staider account for New Zealand in Paul Christoffel's Censored: A Short History of Censorship in New Zealand (Wellington: Dept of Internal Affairs 1989). For a view to Coleman's left we recommend The High Price Of Heaven (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 1999) by noted Australian author David Marr.

     other countries

Nations censor books for a variety of reasons. In 2007 for example the Malaysian Internal Security Ministry used the Printing Presses & Publications Act 1984 to ban 37 titles containing "twisted facts that can undermine the faith of Muslims" - "These publications can cause confusion and apprehension among Muslims and eventually jeopardise public order". The titles included Haideh Moghissi's Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limit of Post-modern Analysis. So much for the view that "confusion and apprehension" are a condition of postmodernity.

Censorship in Canadian Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queens Uni Press 2001) by Mark Cohen offers a point of entry for writing about Canadian print censorship.

For contemporary France see in particular Circles of Censorship: Censorship and Its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1997) by Nicholas Harrison and Forbidden Fictions: Pornography and Censorship in Twentieth-Century French Literature (London: Pluto Press 1999) by John Phillips.

     libraries

The history of library censorship has often featured supine institutions and professional bodies (understandably, given executive recruitment patterns and the difficulty of hiding a collection) and less often, despite much rhetoric, brave librarians.

Perspectives on the interaction of libraries and censorship are provided in Censorship in Public Libraries in the United Kingdom During the Twenieth Century (London: Bowker 1976) by Anthony Thompson, Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association's Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939-1969 (Westport: Greenwood 1997) by Louise Robbins and C.E Beeby's Books You Couldn't Buy: Censorship in New Zealand (Wellington: Price Milburn 1981).

Some themes are illustrated in "An Active Instrument for Propaganda": The American Public Library During World War I (Westport: Greenwood 1989) by Wayne Wiegand, In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character (Columbus: Ohio State Uni Press 2002) by Pamela Steinle the 2000 Erotica in Australian Libraries: Are We Negligent Collection Managers? paper by Edgar Crook and Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland (Norman: Uni of Oklahoma Press 2007) by Shirley Wiegand & Wayne Wiegand.

A perspective on access in libraries to particular print publications that are restricted online is provided by the 1997 report by the US Department of Justice's cybercrime unit on The Availability of Bombmaking Information.

The IFLA/FAIFE World Report 2003 on Intellectual Freedom in the Information Society, Libraries and the Internet is available here. The American Library Association offers a list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000, including Maurice Sendak's sublime In the Night Kitchen, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Roald Dahl's The Witches, Richard Wright's Native Son, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Guess What? by Australia's Mem Fox.

Some sense of libraries as contested territory in the US 'culture wars' is provided by Rich Lowry's unlovely 2003 diatribe regarding the COPA legislation highlighted earlier in this guide -

A Shakespeare character famously said, "Let's kill all the lawyers." This gibe has lost none of its relevance through the centuries. But today we might reply to that acerbic line, "Sure -- but only if we can kill all the librarians next."

The unwillingness to keep vagrants out of libraries goes to the fundamental inability of leftist librarians to distinguish between maintaining minimal public standards and creeping fascism. This is starkest in the pornography debate, with many librarians defending "the right" of patrons to download Internet porn in libraries, effectively making their computer terminals the "Larry Flynt Section."

and Joyce Li's 2000 Cyberporn: The Controversy paper.

     textbooks

The culture wars are also evident in US debate about textbook censorship, highlighted in works such as Diane Ravitch's The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Knopf 2003) and Joan Delfattore's What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook Censorship in America (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1992).

It's been observed that in comparison people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada seem more relaxed about curriculum and texts, although Brought to Book: Censorship & School Libraries in Australia (Port Melbourne: ALIA Thorpe 1993) by Claire Williams & Ken Dillon suggests some disquiet.

In other nations the 'battle of the books' has major political significance, with a decade of litigation in Japan for example over suggestions for revision of junior and secondary school texts that elide war crimes in accounts of the period from 1922 to 1945.

The Japanese experience is incisively considered by Gavin McCormack's 'The Japanese Movement to 'Correct' History' in Censoring History: Citizenship & Memory in Japan, Germany & the United States (Armonk: Sharpe 2000) edited by Laura Hein & Mark Selden. An online account is here. Complacency east of Hawaii might be offset by works such as History Wars: The Enola Gay & Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan 1996) edited by Edward Linenthal & Tom Engelhardt.

Debate about curriculum in universities and in junior/secondary schools is discussed later in this guide.

     book burning

Ray Bradbury's 1953 Fahrenheit 451 highlighted 'rectification of memory' - damnatio memoriae - through the destruction of books and libraries. That has been a theme throughout history. Caliph Omar, sometimes blamed for destruction of what was left of the Library of Alexandria in 641 AD, supposedly responded to a question

If what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore

Some of the more fanciful accounts claim that recycled manuscripts fuelled the city's bathhouses for six months. After the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 the Tigris apocryphally ran black with ink for days after the conquerors used the library - the largest in the Islamic world - to build a bridge. In 1562 Spain immolated much of Aztec and Mayan written culture in a series of exemplary bonfires. Several centuries later Pol Pot sought to free Kampuchea from improper ideas and attitudes by eliminating Cambodia's libraries and librarians. In 1992 'ethnic cleansing' in Sarajevo featured censorship through the deliberate destruction of the National & University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with loss of over 1.5 million books and manuscripts.

There has been surprisingly little written about biblioclasm or libricide. Three recent works are Rebecca Knuth's Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger 2003), Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Ancient Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan 2004) edited by James Raven and The Holocaust & the Book: Destruction & Preservation (Amherst: Uni of Massachusetts Press 2001) edited by Jonathan Rose.

The latter is of particular merit; it can be supplemented by studies such as Stanislao Pugliese's 1999 Bloodless Torture: The Books of the Roman Ghetto under the Nazi Occupation (PDF). Initial Nazi immolation of 'entartete' print features here and in Guy Stern's Nazi Book Burning & the American Response (Detroit: Wayne State University 1990). We have not sighted Fernando Baez' Historia universal de la destruccion de libros: De las tablillas sumerias a la guerra de Irak (Barcelona: Editorial Destino 2004).

Attitudes towards biblioclasm are highlighted in Marc Drogin's Biblioclasm: The Mythical Origins, Magic Powers & Perishability of the written word (Savage: Rowman & Littlefield 1989) and - perhaps more memorably - in Elias Canetti's masterwork Auto-da-fe (London: Cape 1972). A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins 2003) by Nicholas Basbanes and Library: An Unquiet History (New York: Norton 2003) by Matthew Battles consider the durability of individual works and collections. Holbrook Jackson's quirky The Fear of Books (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 2001), like his The Anatomy of Bibliomania and and Charles Gillett's Burned books: neglected chapters in British history and literature (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1932), offers another view of western attitudes.

Statistics are provided in UNESCO's Lost Memory - Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the Twentieth Century (RTF), which notes the absence of attention to events such as the 1988 fire that damaged or destroyed around 3.6 million books in the Academy of Sciences Library in St Petersburg.

Bradbury has since described Fahrenheit 451 as a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, rather than about government censorship or a response to Senator McCarthy stifling US creativity.

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