Is it like banning a book if Wal-Mart decides to stop selling it? Interesting story about Wal-Mart deciding to stop selling “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a famous racist tract which has long been known to be fake. Some discussion of this over at Reason.com and Metafilter.com. It’s interesting to watch how the other online retailers that still stock the book have been editing their web copy, post-hubbub. Of particular note, Amazon’s page [current page, Google cache] used to contain this phrase from the book description [provided by the publisher] “If, however. The Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs.” Reading all the customer reviews is a bone-chilling exercise.
Category: books
banned books, the acceptable taboo?
The Ska Librarian aka Dan Cherubin has written an excellent article on Banned Books Week for Counterpoise.
Banned Books Week does a reverse spin by focusing solely on the library as a children’s space, complete with requisite put-upon spinster. With Banned Books Week, ALA has created a safe space for generating a manageable and marketable taboo. It could be that with all the actual fighting librarians do over real issues, they wanted something that they could profess to win repeatedly. If one creates one�s own taboo, one usually knows the easiest way to transgress it.
Information=Terrorism?
“Books Cause Dangerous Thought. Leave Books Here – Don’t Make Us Come Get Them” [thanks chuck]
Borges bio review
The Economist reviews a new Borges biography.
It is a challenge to write a biography of a man who did little more than read and think, whose myopia turned to blindness in middle age, who was an auto-didact whose only real job was as a librarian, and who lived with his mother and her housekeeper in a poky Buenos Aires flat until she died at 99, when he was 75. Shortly before that, he wrote gloomily: “My father’s library has been the chief event in my life…the truth is that I have never emerged from it.”
does your library have enough copies of the 9/11 report?
How many copies of the 9/11 Commission Report does your library have? Massachusetts Representative William Delahunt, hearing that his constituents were having trouble getting the book from their libraries bought copies for all 60 public libraries in his district. It was also heartening to hear that some libraries were showing their patrons how to access the content of the book on the internet as a backup. [thanks kate]