Tea at Trianon: The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

From First Things:

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.” (Read more.)