Banned Books Week originates in the United States and is closely linked to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which speaks of freedom of speech. It is one of the rights to which Americans attach great importance. Libraries from around the world actively join the initiative, launched in the USA, every year.
The Pedagogical Library in Bolesławiec decided to organize an exhibition of banned books. Posters introducing the topic have been placed on easels. They present the history of censorship throughout the centuries. Examples are given of both repressive censorship (that which involved punishment following the publication of a blasphemous work) and preventive censorship (the control of all works before they were printed). The index of books banned by the Catholic Church is also discussed in a few sentences.
Books were once banned for many reasons: political ones (“The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz), social ones (“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A. Heinlein, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey), moral ones (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, “The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism” by de Sade, “Ulysses” by James Joyce), for promoting feminist views (“A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen), or religious ones (“The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie, “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis, the series about Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling). Almost all of the works listed above are in the library’s collection and will be available to all readers after the initiative ends. Those not held in the library’s collections are presented on a special poster in the form of book covers.
The exhibition is open to everyone from September 19 to October 12, 2012. at the Pedagogical Library in Bolesławiec, 11 Tyrankiewiczów Street.
(information: Pedagogical Library in Bolesławiec/ii)