Books chained to desks. Books kept in locked rooms, only accessible by staff. Your use of a particular book being evaluated and potentially denied by staff if it wasn’t “suitable” for your race, gender, social status or age. Novels and other “trashy” texts excluded from the collection. This was the common state of libraries until surprisingly recently.
Why?
- Books used to be super expensive. Restricting access helped ensure they wouldn’t be stolen.
- We had narrow ideas about the “best” books. Best didn’t mean the ones you most wanted to read; it meant the ones that were morally uplifting, the ones that would help you better conform to society, the ones that only included people doing the “right” things.
- Values change over time.
1938-1939 marked the true beginning of intellectual freedom as a core value in American libraries. This was a time of increased authoritarianism across the world, with the rise of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Stalin in the Soviet Union. The 1930s had been marked by massive book burnings, and other attempts to control free public expression and thought.
There were a number of American citizens sympathetic to authoritarianism and interested in controlling ideas in America too. In reaction, in 1938, Forrest Spaulding—the director of the Des Moines Public Library—wrote the first draft of the Library Bill of Rights (adopted and now maintained and promoted by the American Library Association).
With these new rights came new concerns. There were fights over the depiction of slavery, reconstruction, racial integration and the Civil War. There were fights over which books could be in school. There were fights over books that included topics like sexual health, death, grief, drugs and addiction. But why do people care about this stuff? Why fight about books?
Think about the books you like most. They transport you to other places. They help you not to feel alone. They can help you understand other people, and why they make choices you wouldn’t. They can help you make your own good choices. But those things are also scary.
As a parent, you may worry about your children finding ideas you think are bad. As a community member, you may wish certain ideas were less widespread. Intellectual freedom elevates the right of each individual to choose for themselves, and each parent to choose for their own children—without restricting the rights of others to do the same.
Banned Books Week began in the 1980s, prompted by a rise in book ban attempts, which had spiked to 700-800 challenges per year at the time. With activism and a Supreme Court case or two and cultural changes during that decade, the number of attempts dropped in the 1990s and early 2000s, but in the last five years, there have been more challenges than ever.
Canton Public Library typically receives fewer than five requests for reconsideration per year. When we do receive a request—i.e. when someone tells us they don’t think an item should be available at the library, or in a particular area, and then follows the formal next steps outlined by staff, we have a standard process we follow to evaluate the item in question. This process, along with other important information about how we decide what items to carry, can be found in our Materials Selection Policy.
Banned Books Week this year is October 5-11, 2025. The annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together libraries, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers and readers like you in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.
The best way to celebrate Banned Books Week is to read. Read the most frequently challenged books. Talk and share about the books you love—you can even add comments to them in the CPL catalog.
When someone tells you a book is bad in some way, don’t just take their word for it. Try reading it, or at least skimming it, yourself. Often, context gets lost in translation, and the person who made the comment may not have even read the book themselves.
Learn more about book bans:
Explore more about the joy of reading widely:
Find books others have loved:
- Use the catalog filters to look for items with five-star ratings, or tagged with genres/themes you like.
- Ask a librarian to suggest ideas either in person or through May We Suggest.
- Ask someone you know for a recommendation!
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