I recently met Nicholas Allan, the author of (among many other children’s books) Where Willy Went: The BIG story of a little sperm. He mentioned to me that his agent had recently sold rights for this story to be produced in Japan as a theatrical production. He (and I) would love to see that play. As we spoke about it, I wondered whether it would be produced in the USA in the current climate of censorship.
I recall that in 1996 I had a conversation with one of the telephone sellers in my New York office who was aggrieved because he had just lost a sale worth some $8,000, and the corresponding commission cheque, of the (forthcoming) The Dictionary of Art (34 volumes). He had been talking to the librarian of a Christian four-year college (university in British English). To close the sale, he had sent the librarian proofs of a selection of articles from the thousands in the book, and had not hesitated to include an entry on Gay and lesbian art. That one text out of thousands lost him the sale. The salesman explained to the librarian that the article did not advocate homosexuality or lesbianism, to no avail. The librarian explained to him that students graduated from the college without ever being made aware of those topics, let alone reading about them in the library.
Of course, that librarian had not censored the book itself, since it was still, widely available, but she had denied her students access to the latest scholarship on the history of art worldwide. This kind of censorship was nothing new, although librarians generally stand on the side of access to books, not withdrawing them. A recent article in The Observer by Richard Ovenden, librarian of the Bodleian Library in Oxford noted that the American Library Association reported that, between 2001 and 2020, 273 individual titles were challenged each year. In 2023 the number was 9,021.
Ovenden’s article attributes the increase in censorship in libraries to the activities of “extremist groups that expound conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and the Proud Boys, and to political action committees that channel funds to rightwing causes.” He mentions, in particular, Moms for Liberty. Friends in Florida will be familiar with this organization, since it persuaded governor Ron de Santis to pass legislation that permits citizens to demand that “harmful” books be removed from school libraries. Books that are challenged are to be removed from the shelves and scrutinized by a committee that decides whether or not to uphold the challenge. Moms for Liberty promptly challenged large numbers of books in many schools, with the intention of creating such a quantity of books to be scrutinized that the titles would, in effect, be banned because of the sheer quantity of books that committees had to examine. One parent complained that his son had been embarrassed when he showed friends a book that he had borrowed from his school library. No matter that the school librarian checked her records and reported that the boy had not borrowed the book: it had been challenged so off the shelves with it.
The denial of access to ideas is not confined to schools and children. The US Secretary of Defense has ordered that all books that discuss diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, critical race theory and other out-of-favour subjects be removed from the library of West Point and other military libraries. One of the titles removed is Maya Angelou’s classic work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I suspect that the enemies of the USA will be encouraged to learn that the nation’s Secretary of Defense thinks that his soldier lack the moral fortitude and powers of discernment to deal with books and their ideas that challenge their assumptions.
Censorship of school textbooks is a long-established tradition in large, politically and socially conservative US states such as Texas. For decades, members of conservative groups there have been elected to the state boards that select school textbooks. These boards examine publishers’ textbooks and demand that “objectionable” material be removed. Because Texan schools are an enormous market, these state boards, can in effect censor books adopted in states with less restrictive ideologies since publishers cannot afford to produce multiple editions of textbooks. In other words, publishers can be coerced to censor their own books.
Ovenden’s article prompted me to examine my own career to consider whether I had censored books. I must confess that, in some cases I have exercised some degree of censorship, although, to the best of my knowledge, never to the extent of excluding a subject entirely. For example, one of my great successes was a textbook for US college Art Appreciation courses, Gateways to Art. One of the three authors included in the second edition a discussion of the artist Jenny Saville, whose oeuvre includes nude, full-body, self-portraits, which depict the artist from a low, severely foreshortened viewpoint. The author proposed a particular work which, depicted in part the artist’s genitals (the author denied that this was the case, but I knew that that particular work would lose sales in conservative regions). We discussed alternatives and found a work that was typical of Saville’s output, was still quite shocking, but not quite so explicit. The result was that Saville’s work was made available to students, while reducing the likelihood that instructors might prohibit the entire textbook on account of a single image.
And I must confess that I took the illustrations suggested by the author of the article on Erotic art in The Dictionary of Art to my bosses. We decided that some would lose us sales in several countries and edited the selection of illustrations accordingly. Similarly, I was sufficiently concerned about the impact on sales of works that depicted the Prophet that I contacted Professor Oleg Grabar of Harvard for advice. He told me that the insistence of some Muslims that depictions of the Prophet are forbidden is historically unsustainable, since there are many works produced in Islamic societies that depict him. Nevertheless, he suggested that we need not be overly zealous in including all the illustrations suggested by authors, but that those of great historical significance must be included. Again, the result was to deal with an important historical phenomenon, but not to be overly provocative. In both cases, nothing of historical importance was censored, but judgements were made about exactly how far it was wise to include provocative examples that could be omitted without depriving the reader of significant information.
Sometimes, it was not I as publisher who censored works of art in my books. The first edition of Gateways to Art discussed the controversy concerning an exhibition entitled Sensation at Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999-2000. The show included a portrait of the Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili made with elephant Dung, which some considered sacrilegious. Rudi Giuliani, then Mayor of New York, tried unsuccessfully to close the exhibition, thus guaranteeing international fame for Ofili’s work. However, the gallery that represented Ofili’s work refused permission to reproduce the work in our book, arguing that it had been over exposed. Given our schedule, we had to choose another work from the show. We chose Marc Quinn’s Self, a sculptural self-portrait made with the artist’s frozen blood. When I visited an art professor at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque she told me that it was clear that we should have illustrated Ofili’s work, and that she and her colleagues could not support a publisher who they believed to have censored its own books. I tried to explain that it was not I who had censored the book, but the artist’s own representative, but to no avail. I left aggrieved but full of admiration for the professors who stood firm on a matter of principle.
It is also possible for publishers to censor books by including, rather than excluding material. When I examined the textbooks of rival publishers designed for college courses in evolution and prehistory, I noticed that some made a virtue of “impartiality” by including a discussion of Creationism to “balance” the discussion of evolutionary theory. Neither I, nor the publisher I worked for, would have contemplated lowering standards by pretending that Creationist ideas had the same intellectual and scientific status as Darwinian evolution. In a religion textbook, my decision might have been quite different, but not in a prehistory text.
Publishers take many decisions in the course of publishing a book that might be defined as censorship, by deciding whether illustrations or topics discussed in the text should be included or excluded. These might be driven by financial reasons (fears of lost sales), by legal reasons (fear of being sued for libel etc.), but in the great majority of cases are the result of a publisher’s instinct to offer the reader the best book possible. Of course, such decisions are conditioned by the social norms of the time. I am sure that the original publisher of Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the Narcissus, for instance, never stopped for a moment to consider the propriety of title, but a work with that word in the title could not be published today. Conrad’s book is an example of a classic that lives on despite that objectionable title. Nevertheless, while the title had been accepted by his British publisher, the novel was originally published in 1897 in the USA as The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle. In other words, there were doubts about the propriety of the title even in 1897.
In the days when I read to my sons at bedtime, I picked up children’s books published by my employer, Macmillan. At one time we had large numbers of titles from the Just William series of Richmal Crompton. Although they were by then very old-fashioned, and included some distasteful social attitudes, the stories were well-enough written that those factors seemed not to matter to me or my sons. However, William and the Nasties was another story. In this novel, William and his friends, at a loose end, decide to play at being Nasties: i.e. Nazis. Since Nasties are nasty to Jews, the boys decide to be unkind to Mr. Isaacs who owns the village sweetshop, but instead they end up capturing a robber stealing from Mr. Issacs. I don’t think I would have published this in 1934, and certainly not now.
A more recent trend, which to some extent meets he definition of censorship, is the question of the character of the author, and whether some misdeed on the part of the author should prevent a book being published. A friend who is President of the New York publisher W. W. Norton, had to deal with just such a case. Norton had published, to critical acclaim, a biography of the writer Philip Roth (who was himself controversial for being a misogynist) by Blake Bailey. Sometime after the book had been published Norton received an anonymous accusation that Bailey was guilty of sexual misconduct. Since the accusation was anonymous, the publisher could not do anything other than to ask Baily whether the accusations were true. However, the anonymous accusation was then sent to the New York Times. The Times accused Norton of failing to act on the accusation, to say the least a harsh judgement since the newspaper itself could not confirm or refute the accusation since it was anonymous. However, the controversy resulted in more accusations about Bailey’s conduct which were not anonymous. Norton faced a dilemma. Since the book was clearly an excellent account of Roth’s life as reviews had attested, and since many copes had already been sold, was it Norton’s place to withhold it from the public? On the other hand, should a person who was probably guilty of, at least, severe misconduct, be allowed to profit from the book’s publication. Norton’s decision was to withdraw the book from bookstores and online retailers, to cancel the contract (another publisher eventually reissued the book) and to donate the equivalent of Bailey’s advance to charities that supported women who had suffered sexual assault. I know from discussions with my friend that this was a very difficult set of decisions; no solution would have been perfect, and it was not possible to make Bailey’s book disappear. However, my friend’s decision did not censor Bailey’s book: it had been distributed and was available to readers, and another publisher issued it.
This story reminded me, in a small way, of a case from my own work as a publisher. I was once asked by a colleague, when I next visited New York, to call on an author who was an authority in his field, to write a new book. When I happened to mention this to another colleague, I was asked whether I knew that this author had been convicted of a federal felony, and offence connected with his area of expertise? I met the author, and, unsurprisingly, the subject of his conviction was not discussed. We met two or three times and the book was duly published. In my opinion, a spent conviction was no reason for the author’s expertise to be withheld from the public.
A controversy, somewhat similar to these cases, has arisen in the UK concerning a book called The Salt Path, a memoir-cum-inspirational book about a couple who found the resolution of severe setbacks in long-distance walking. The book was a bestseller, was followed by two more books, and a fourth was about to be published. But then The Observer published a series of articles that accused the author of not telling the truth about the financial troubles that she and her severely ill partner endured: according to The Observer, the author had embezzled a substantial sum from an employer, and the debt that resulted from paying the money back was the cause of the couple’s financial problems. Apparently, the account in The Salt Path omits the alleged embezzlement and attributes the author’s money problems to something else.
The Observer account rather primly blames the publisher for not “fact-checking” the book, attributing this to reduced editorial standards driven by profit-seeking. Noting that book publishers do not oblige authors to base their work on multiple sources as (presumably more virtuous) journalists do. The paper also seems to be astonished that publishing contracts oblige authors to submit text that is, to the best of the author’s knowledge, accurate (and, incidentally, I might add not to breach anybody else’s copyright nor to libel or defame anybody). The Observer seems to consider this a dereliction of duty on the part of the publisher, as serious as the supposed lack of fact checking. But think about this a moment. When you employ a craftsman to do a repair at your home, don’t you explicitly or implicitly expect him to do a professional job, not to use stolen materials, and not to damage your neighbour’s property in the course of the works? Well, unsurprisingly, publisher’s ask authors to deliver a professional product that has not been stolen from another writer and does not harm anybody. As for fact checking, it is one thing to check facts for two or three columns in a newspaper, quite another if you are responsible for tens of books of several hundred pages per year. And, as for the background of Bailey or the author of The Salt Path, is it really reasonable for publishers to investigate the personal background of the hundreds of authors it publishes every year?
As of writing, the only consequence of this controversy is that the publisher has delayed the fourth book written by the author, presumably to wait for the brouhaha to die down. There is no simple answer to the question of whether or not the publisher should have checked the story behind The Salt Path and either refused to publish it or instruct the author to tell the truth. Although readers can reasonably expect a memoir to reveal misdeeds in the author’s past, even confessional memoirs may not be entirely truthful, and no doubt quite properly omit sensitive or personal details, especially if they affect others – this is self-censorship which may be quie right and proper. And it seems that The Salt Path is in part intended as an inspirational tale of the role of long-distance walking in overcoming adversity. In that respect it may well be true, and seems to have enchanted and inspired many readers.
In short, there are many degrees and forms of what one might consider censorship, and a number of players may be involved in quasi or partial censorship. However, the censorship exposed by Richard Ovenden is another matter. The most appalling fact in a tale of appalling denial of the right to read what one wishes is the ruling of a judge in Llano County, Texas, just west of Austin. According to Ovenden, the judge ruled that library users have no first amendment rights of access to books: the provision of books in a public library is allowable “government speech”, entitled to no constitutional protection whatsoever. Dictators everywhere will agree.
