Banned books!

This week on the blog we share details of a lovely display curated by staff in our Business and Intellectual Property department (BIPC) for Banned Books Week 2023 (October 1 – 7), using some treasures from our Central Library collections. The display is available to view on the 2nd floor of the Central Library. This is the second display our BIPC team have put together and that we’ve featured on the Secret Library. They’re already planning more exciting cabinets of wonder, so keep an eye out for more displays like this coming soon!

All the books featured in the display are available to loan on our library catalogue – please click a title of a book to be directed to the catalogue and make a reservation (Leeds Libraries card required. You can join the Library online ).

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer by Peter Wright (1987)
The book was banned in England from 1985-1987 for allegedly revealing state secrets. The author was a former MI5 intelligence officer. The newspaper gag order and ban did not apply in Scotland and Scottish newspapers reported the event and books were smuggled from Scotland to England.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence (1928)
One of the most famous banned books in the UK. The sexually explicit novel was published in Italy in 1928 and in Paris the following year. It was banned in the UK after its publishers, Penguin, were brought to trial under the Obscene Publications Act. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1960.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
The book has faced multiple banning attempts due to the sexual violence it depicts. In 1973, a bookseller in Orem, Utah was arrested for selling the novel along with two other ‘obscene’ books. As recently as 2019, members of the Florida Citizens Alliance lobbied to ban the book along with almost one hundred other ‘pornographic’ novels.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1998)
This novel created one of the most violent and enduring backlashes in literary history. Its publication was met with demonstrations, riots and bans in Muslim-majority countries. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa after which an Italian translator of the novel was stabbed, a Japanese translator was murdered and a Norwegian publisher shot and wounded. Rushdie was forced into hiding for years. The book is still banned in more than a dozen countries.

A violent attack on Rushdie in New York in August 2022 has reignited discussions around censorship in literature.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
The writer’s left-wing views led to this book being banned by Fascist regimes in Italy and Yugoslavia in the 1920s/1930s and later burned by the Nazis in Germany.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
Ever since its release, the book has been the subject of controversy and repeated attempts to have it banned. Notoriously, the first to suppress the book was Ellis’s then publisher, Simon & Schuster, who decided to cancel the book’s contract after reading the manuscript. But it was then published by Random House and has remained in print ever since, despite successive attempts to have it removed from availability due to its graphic violence.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
The book was banned In Germany for its depiction of World War One. Following the Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1933, All Quiet on the Western Front was among the first books to be publicly burnt at demonstrations in Germany.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, the book has been repeatedly banned in schools across the United States. Parents are the most common group attempting to remove the novel from schools with objections about its depiction of racism, sexuality and domestic violence.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Since it was published, Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned or challenged on at least 18 occasions in the USA due to bad language or sexual and religious references. In 1973 the Drake Public School Board in North Dakota burned 32 copies in the high school’s coal burner.

Naked Lunch by William. S. Burroughs (1959)
Controversial in both its subject matter and its language, the book was originally banned in parts of the USA. Several of its European publishers were harassed and in 1962 the German translation of the novel intentionally left some of the most explicit sections as untranslated English.

Maurice by E.M Forster (drafted 1914, published in 1971)
Although he completed ‘Maurice’ in 1914, E M Forster decided that his novel depicting homosexual love should not be published until after his death. He explained in a note that the book’s happy ending would prove the main obstacle to the novel’s acceptance in print. (In the UK it was not until 1967 that the law changed to allow two men to be in a relationship together without the fear of being arrested).

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
This book, which depicts a dystopian future in which a book-banning totalitarian regime rules America, has been subject to bans, censorship, and redactions.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
Facsimile of manuscript (Please note that this item is not available to loan)
One of the most notable themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship. In the novel’s Ministry of Truth photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of “unpersons” (people who have been erased from history by the Party).

Since its publication the book has been banned and censored in countries around the world for its social and political themes as well as its sexual content. You can find loanable copies of this classic text on our library catalogue.