When a book is placed on a banned book list, Owner of Persnickety Books Ian Baltutis notices — right before the title flies off the shelf. The Burlington used bookstore has everything from textbooks and classics to graphic novels and children’s chapter books, and Baltutis said banned books find their ways onto the shelves, too.
“I see every time we get a book that's banned, it becomes a conversation within the community,” Baltutis said. “The danger, or the concern, would be if the book disappears and nobody's able to access it.”
Book banning is considered a form of censorship, and occurs when individuals, government officials or organizations remove a book from libraries, school districts or bookstores. According to The First Amendment Encyclopedia, “book banning is the most widespread form of censorship in the United States,” particularly within children’s literature.
And in the past two years, book bans have begun to sweep across the country. A Tennessee school district removed the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus from the curriculum about the Holocaust because the book had mentions of nudity and curse words. In Oklahoma, Senate Bill 1142 was put forward prohibiting public school districts, public charter schools and public school libraries from having or promoting books about topics relating to sex, sexual preferences or gender identity.
In the 2021 State of America’s Libraries report compiled by the American Library Association, 273 books were affected by “censorship attempts.” Bans, which are completely removing a book from a particular space, are less common than challenges, which are when books are called into question based on objections by a person or group, according to the ALA. According to censorship statistics compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, 50% of challenges were initiated by parents and 43% of challenges took place in libraries.
Elon News Network spoke with Baltutis about different types of book bans, books that are currently banned and the intersection of book bans and used bookstores.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You said sell banned books here at Persnickety, but which banned books do you sell? Are there different types of bans?
“There's lots of different bans. The books that we carry, we don't filter any of them when they come to the store other than for condition, and so if it's a book, we’ll put it on the shelf. There's lots of different banned lists around the country for specific school districts or states or library systems, and we don't use that to preclude any books from going onto our shelves.”
You said you notice an impact when a book is placed on the banned list. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
“Yeah, we see when a book gets banned and shows up in the news and people hear about it, they all of a sudden take notice and ask ‘well, why was this book banned?’ and a lot of people will reach out and try to get a copy because they want to read it. They want to see what in it was so controversial that somebody would think about putting it on a banned books list.
And so oftentimes we see something like right now, with Maus, we've seen that we’re out of stock on that one, and we get those in from time to time.”
As more and more bands keep coming, obviously there's the impact of Persnickety selling out of some titles. But what do you think is the larger impact will be overall with this upward trend of a lot of books being banned?
“I'm not entirely sure what the impact is going to be. I see every time we get a book that's banned, it becomes a conversation within the community. Folks again want to read it, they want to talk about what's the content in it that made it so controversial, or some people think it's controversial for, and ultimately that becomes part of that community conversation. The danger, or the concern, would be if the book disappears and nobody's able to access it.
That's why I think used bookstores have this unique responsibility in a community to enable people to access reading materials and to enable them to access some that may be out of print, that may be more obscure, or that may be banned.”
You have some of the banned book titles with you. Could you show us a couple of the ones that you have?
“Yeah … there's numerous different banned books lists around the country, so books like The Hunger Games may be something that we're all fairly familiar with, but some of the themes and narratives in them can get different groups to ask that they not be available to readers. Something like Tolkien and Lord of the Rings can be controversial. Sometimes it's based on content like sexual content, exposure about racism, or can even be magic and specific religions. So, The Glass Castle, is another one, the Book Thief, so a lot of these titles that we're familiar with, and even something like Farewell to Arms from Ernest Hemingway; everything from new to old.
There are different pieces in a book that can cause it to be banned. But a lot of times I look at that as that's a window into what the world was like when Hemingway was writing. It's the way people spoke. It's the way they acted. It's the culture at the time, and it's a snapshot for us to know what life was like and what people were talking about, and the danger is when we forget about that; when we forget about the atrocities that humans have been able to create, the hatred that humans have had towards each other. And so, making sure that literature like that is still available, helps us all widen our perspective and have that hindsight.”
Is there anything you'd like to add, anything you feel I missed at all?
“Yeah, I’d say, in addition to book bans, we do have that kind of filter of, we really only have access to what people are reading locally. So, our selection is dependent upon what people trade in or donate to the store.
Each used bookstore, bookstores around the country can have a different selection, whether they've got a university with certain academic programs, or they've got different reading groups in the community that are bringing books in, buying new books, and then making those available through used bookstores and little free libraries around the community.
But then too, when we're talking about banned books, there's another category that I think of which is historic and vintage books. You see a lot of people coming in looking for old textbooks, and textbooks in particular because they are that window into how people were learning, what was being taught. I've found some really amazing ones, when you look at elementary social studies books from North Carolina, people trade them in from decades ago, and you look at the way things like the Civil War are framed, and the way different pieces of history are framed based on when it was written into that textbook. And so again, those can be amazing lenses on how our culture has changed over time. To ban those, to try to wipe them out, to try to get those out of our cultural history only blinds us to our history.”