Banned bookpile contest
Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, and with it, LibraryThing's latest bookpile contest. Here's a selection of books from my library that have been banned/censored/challenged at one time or another - let's see what you all have.Banned Books Week, according to the American Library Association, has been observed since 1982, and "reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted." Check out their website for more details. Wikipedia also maintains a list of banned books, and Google even has a page up.
Banned Books Week runs from today (September 23rd) through next Saturday, September 30th, and so does our bookpile contest. So, the rules are the same as usual:
1. Take a photo of your bookpile
2. Upload it to Flickr, tag it with "LTBannedContest"
3. Email me (abby
librarything.com). Include the URL to the photo(s) on Flickr, and your user name on LT.4. Do it all by September 30th. We'll announce the winner on the blog the following day.
One winner gets a free year's membership to LibraryThing.*
*No hats this time, but here's proof of the first official LibraryThing Pirate Hat before it was sent all the way to Topper in Nashville.
posted by Abby at 11:47 PM
15 Comments:
Nice! I like the hat. :)
Gotta love banned books ^_^ Why banned them, cause it's just itching to be read more
I like the idea. I have a pony-request, though. Is it possible for you to provide a widget to cross-match one's LibraryThing library list against the banned books list?
I realize that the act of scanning the banned books list is really the point here. I guess I'm just lazy.
How about encouraging everyone on LT to apply the tag "banned" to any book they have from the Index, and then at the end of the week we could have a special Zeitgeist for Most Popular Banned Book, Most Popular Banned Author, Who Has the Most Banned Books, etc.
Oh, I like rjo's idea! I think that just might be a nice weekend project. ;-)
Hmm, the tag combining option is still not operational, in the meantime could the LT admin. combine 'banned' with 'banned book' & 'banned books' for a more complete picture.
Just a quick note to make a special mention of Savoy Books with regards to "Banned Books". David Britton (one of its founders) has actually served time in prison (twice) for publishing books. The full sorry story is on their website at http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/storyof3.html
The books involved were -
Charles Platt's The Gas - of which 3 copies have been catalogued on LT
Samuel R. Delany's The Tides of Lust - no copies here.
And finally his own book Lord Horror which has the dubious distinction of being the last novel to be officially found obscene (and hence banned) in the UK (this decision was later overturned on appeal). Again no copies have been catalogued here.
Thanks for the links!
I tagged my books.
The list was really an eye-opener, but some of the reasons for book-banning were so absurd! I was ROFL especially after reading these two:
The Lorax for negatively depicting the lumber industry!!! (This happens to be my favorite Dr. Seuss book.)
Where's Waldo? for depicting nudity by showing a topless mermaid!!! (My guess is that the mermaid had to be microscopic in size. Besides, where and how would a mermaid have access to a department store?)
Here's a list of books that were challenged and/or banned in Canada. The hyperlink is to an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file:
Challenged Books List
Includes a few Canadian titles that didn't make it onto the other lists I've seen, e.g. Timothy Findley's The Wars.
This list is provided courtesy of Canada's Freedom to Read website, which is worth a visit in its own right.
"Flag Abuse." I've nothing to say about banned books.
I'd like to have an explanation of the link "flag abuse" on groups. I'm too nervous to click on it as after I wrote a message and looked to see what it meant message came to me, "do you really want to flag this message?"
Well I don't know. What is flagging a message? What is flag abuse?"
Ellen
RE: Flag abuse
Here, "flag" is a verb. "Flagging" a post means to indicate that a post is abusive (such as making a personal attack on someone, spamming the group, using offensive language, etc.).
Unfortunately, the flag abuse isn't working properly--it won't take more than one. I'm waiting for Robyn to help me with that one.
I spent some time yesterday going through this book, as well as the lists mentioned here. I have quite a few "banned" books marked now, but I'm sure there are many others I've missed.
Along with all the "obvious" books, I've added the banned tags to all the titles I own that are by or about H.H. the Dalai Lama, since the People's Republic of China has not only banned all books written by him, but imprisons people merely for owning a photograph of him.
Speaking of banned books and the Middle Kingdom, I also discovered that way back in 1931, China banned Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on the grounds that animals should not use human language! So everyone who owns a copy of Alice, please note...
If there were a special library of banned books created in LT it would make it easy to see which books we share with the censors without slogging through a list.
But I suppose creating such a hypothetical library would throw off all the zeitgeist stats.
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