Book banning, a pernicious form of censorship, is as old as the book itself. Ancient Romans banned those that contained political criticism or discussed topics deemed immoral, though given the facts of ancient androgyny, pederasty, and bestiality, it seems puzzlingly hard to draw a clear line between moral and immoral. Ironically, Romans of social standing had private libraries, many of which were destroyed by the Goths. Centuries later, the Catholic Church instituted its bans of 1599, a few decades before the first book was suppressed in the future United States (Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, which was critical of Puritan customs and powers) and almost 300 years before Canada’s state-sponsored censorship regime began under the Customs Act of 1867.
In many respects, as Ira Wells shows in On Book Banning, things are even worse today. “Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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