Censorship Promoting Books

 An idea I first ran across in Rex Stout's The League of Frightened Men, if memory serves, pops up in The big idea: what if censoring books only makes them more popular? from yesterday's The Guardian.

That censorship might actually enable the circulation of books rather than restrict it seems counterintuitive, but it’s a pattern we see again and again. As an addendum to the better known Index of Forbidden Books, the Vatican published an Index Expurgatorius: a list of the bits that could be cut from otherwise offensive books to make them acceptable. Of course this became the book equivalent of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to restrict the online circulation of images of her Malibu beach home: a move that inadvertently drew attention to the very things it was intended to suppress. The Protestant librarian Thomas Barlow wrote gleefully that the Catholic church had done his work for him, by pointing to what he himself wanted to read. Similarly in 1960s Oklahoma, when the moral crusading group Mothers United for Decency set up a “smutmobile” filled with objectionable books, surely some locals used this as a handily curated wishlist?

The best sales pitch is the threat of censorship. It draws attention to books that might otherwise have gone under the radar. The academic Indologist Wendy Doniger observed that the lawsuit against her book The Hindus: An Alternative History had had the effect of making it an unexpected bestseller. The publishers, Penguin, originally defended her against charges of being defamatory about the Indian national movement and the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses, but then agreed to cease publication and pulp copies. There were none to be found, because they’d sold out. Probably relatively few readers in 1961 were agog for a cheap copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but the trial created an eager market. Had the prosecutors wanted to restrict access to DH Lawrence’s explicit novel, they might have done better simply to keep quiet about it.

It is truly an ill wind that blows no good.

sch 5/2