I went to my local, very-small-southern-Bible-Belt-Town library asking for a copy of Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism, which is a dense, scholarly book (extensively researched!, lots of end notes!, published by the Oxford University Press!), and not even remotely sensationalist. I put in a request for an interlibrary loan, because they didn’t have a copy in the system that my library is part of; I assumed that it would need to come from a university.
Not unexpectedly, I never received a call, email, text, or anything at all following up on my request. I strongly suspect that they “lost” it.
The book is considerably less expensive now; I think the exchange rate is why it was previously so expensive.
In 3rd or 4th grade I tried to check out Anne Rice’s The Servant of the Bones and was denied because “Anne Rice is too mature for someone as young as you”. I told the librarian that my parents recommended the book after I read Interview with the Vampire, which I found on my parents’ bookshelf after reading Dracula. I was then told that I could bring in a signed permission slip and when I came back with my mom she chewed out the librarian for gatekeeping a book because it has sex in it.
I definitely didn’t understand a lot of the sexy parts the way an adult would, but I enjoyed the story and the mythology it built on. My mom was pretty good, folks.
I was a prolific reader as a kid. Homeschooled, single mom who worked, so I would spend sometimes 6 or 7 hours a day at the library while she was at work. Once I went through the entire kids section, the librarian caught me in the adult section and I thought I’d be in trouble. Instead she showed me this collection of fairy tales that were dark and when my mom came to pick me up, she explained I’d been through everything and asked my mom to sign consent for an adult library card. Which she did, because my mom rocks. Lol. Only book she wouldn’t let me read was the color purple when I was 10. Had to wait a bit for that. Lol.
Thanks for sharing! Are you still an avid reader? Do you have a favourite book?
I don’t get to read as much as I used to. My eyes are terrible now, so I do a lot of audiobooks while I’m driving or cleaning, cooking. I’m a big fan of urban fantasy, love Jim Butcher. But my favorite book is The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Favorite series is the Dark Tower series by King.
Thanks :) I haven’t read much King or any Butcher so I’ll check them out.
what’s the colour purple?
It’s a book that was made into a movie with Whoopie Goldberg. Absolutely amazing book, and one of the few examples of a movie truly holding up in my opinion. Worth watching.
TheColor Purple by Alice Walker, I presume.
Precisely.
My brother was denied shakespear when he was 10 because it was “above his reading level”.
Well, there was this one time that I wanted a book that was in the restricted section, and I didn’t have a teacher’s note allowing me to go in there, so I just took my invisibility cloak one night and snuck in anyway. The librarian suspected nothing.
Not denied, no. But the librarian wasn’t quite sure what to do when I was checking out The Da Vinci Code at about 11 y/o. At the time I didn’t understand why she looked so surprised/concerned when she asked whether it was for my mom and I said no, but I kind of see her point now. Then again, 11 y/o me loved it.
The fact that few public libraries possess Marxist texts—either because the librarians or boards of directors refuse to stock them or because reactionaries destroy them—is a kind of denial or a shadow book ban.
If Marxism is looking to dismantle the way contemporary society and its institutions, why would the institutions stock books on Marxism?
“Read banned books unless they are written by Marxists!” — liberals
Realistically, there are no banned books today, outside of stuff like Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf and terrorist guides. And even those (outside of terrorist guides) are usually just semi-banned, i.e. Amazon and most reasonable booksellers and libraries won’t stock them, but you can buy them by other means and it’s probably not illegal.
So I have no idea what’s your point here. The “liberals” who promote reading “banned books” refer to stuff like small school libraries not stocking whatever the American media and Twitter decided to wreak hysteria about this season.
Either way, in reality New York Public Library holds 168 book by or about Karl Marx.
Marxist books are usually difficult to find in public libraries. They aren’t banned, they’re just mysteriously never purchased and never displayed!
Categorically false, and delusional.
Libraries buy books based on community interest. That’s why they usually have many copies of the latest best-seller, and very few copies of books about, say, getting a ham radio license. When people in a community are interested in Marxist theory–and face it; very, very few people have read Das Kapital in it’s entirety, fewer have fully understood it, and all of them have degrees in philosophy–the libraries will buy books on Marxist theory. When people want to read Walter Benjamin or Mikhail Bakunin, the libraries will buy that. When people want to read Ayn Rand (who is even less entertaining than Marx, and she’s trying to be entertaining), libraries will buy that.
My library has exactly as many copies of Ulysses as they do Das Kapital, and I’m in a very small town in the deep south. No one cares of banning James Joyce. Space on library shelves and funding is limited, and libraries don’t usually see a point in filling up that precious space with, and spending money on books people ‘should’ read that are never going to get checked out.
Libraries buy books based on community interest.
I wonder if a supposed lack of interest in Marxism could have anything to do with over a century of rabid and relentless anti-communism from every privately owned media source and position of authority, combined with the awareness that those Americans who publicly express interest in communism will have their careers and possibly even their lives destroyed?
It’s probably more because philosophy in general isn’t something that lots of people have an interest in, economics are often boring, and Das Kapital combines both into one incredibly dense, challenging to read book.
Personally, I think that Marx and Engels do a great job of describing the problem, but I don’t think that their solution takes human nature into effect. Economics assumes that people are fully rational actors that will do the smartest thing all the time, but that’s clearly not the case; there are other forces shaping human behavior. Marx and Engels don’t seem to account for that.
I’m sorry to hear that’s been your experience with the library system. I have not had the same experience at all. In fact, I’m listening to the audiobook of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire on Libby from my local city library, where they for some reason have unlimited copies of it available.
I also listened to Abolition. Feminism. Now., most of Ursula K Le Guin’s novels, Are Prisons Obsolete?, The Communist Manifesto, An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States, and a whole bunch more through either my city library, or the library in my states capital, since all citizens of the state get a library card for there.
Have you checked services like Libby to see if you can connect with your library card? That could supplement whatever your library has physically, since you’re having issues getting things done through inter library loans.
Libraries are like safe havens from capital for me. One of the last truly public spaces, where I don’t feel pressured to consume or produce. I couldn’t live without them.
mysteriously never purchased
The catalogue I linked literally shows they have a 2023 edition of “Critique of the Gotha Program”, in the very first row of the results.
Nice, how many people live in New York state again?
Keep moving those goalposts, daddy. 🥵 First you claim marxist literature is never purchased by the libraries, which could be easily disproved just by clicking the link I gave you. Then you imply they don’t stock enough, even though according to the catalogue, as I’ve already said, they “hold 168 book by or about Karl Marx”, including multiple copies of the same book (the abovementioned CotGP has 4 copies, an abridged edition of Capital has 49 copies, etc., not even getting into counting the marxist literature not written by Marx).
But it appears you expect the American public library system to lead the communist revolution, so discussing even banal data such as how many books are stocked by a library is probably pointless.
I should test this with my locals
You should do so anonymously. You run the risk of being reported, one way or the other, by expressing interest in communist literature.
