Banning, Protecting, Supporting, and Curating Books

 

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) is wrestling with an unwieldy and difficult issue these days, and, like any other ‘community,’ finds itself short of clear consensus. Let’s start with the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: 

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

Recently a decision was made by the ABA Board (I hope I have the correct attribution here) to qualify the organization’s support of free expression as follows:

 

ABA does not favor the protection of free expression when it comes to speech that violates our commitment to equity and antiracism, i.e., racist speech, anti-Semitic speech, homophobic speech, transphobic speech, etc.

 

Response from members has been strong and mixed. I should mention here that I am not an ABA member only because my bookstore’s inventory is tipped more in the direction of used than of new books, and I found myself during the year I was an ABA member drowning in shipments of brochures, posters, banners, and other promotional material for new books, almost all of it designed for larger, new-only bookstores with dozens of employees. That being the case, I let my membership lapse with the explanation given here but have continued to follow in my daily e-mail Shelf Awareness newsletter news of the bookselling and publishing world, including political issues impinging on that world.

 

I have written on the subject of censorship before and have given: my general position; my response to one very specific brouhaha; and my take on what has been called  

“financially-induced self-censorship,” or what I called in my post “indirect” censorship. 

In response to ABA’s recent qualification on protection of free expression, one bookseller from Utah, Betsy Burton, is horrified. She writes: 

 

Who decides which books to protect and which books not to? What standards do they employ to decide? What does the ABA intend to do with books that they have deemed unfit?

a. Ban them?
b. Burn them?

This might seem an Orwellian sort of reductio ad absurdum. And in one way it is. Because there is no rational answer, at least if one believes in the First Amendment. Either protect all books or throw the First Amendment out the window. 

 

Forgive me for repeating myself here, but I am not a member of Congress. I am a bookseller. When I choose not to stock a particular title, I am not calling down U.S. (or even state) law to forbid the publishing, selling, buying, or owning of that title. Constitutional protection remains in place.

 

What, though, about the bookselling organization’s statement? Had I been on the board and required to vote on the substitution of a qualified statement for the First Amendment statement, I honestly don’t know how I would have voted, but what is clear to me is that the ABA statement has no force of law behind it. Even members of the organization -- and, as I have explained, I am not a member, for purely nonpolitical reasons -- certainly retain Constitutional rights to order, stock, support, publicize, and sell whatever books they choose.

 

The owner of any bookstore (and this would apply to large chains, as well) must always make choices, because no bookstore can stock every existing title. The smaller the bookstore, the more carefully such choices must be made. And, generally speaking, the more personal such choices will be. 

 

My bookstore is a reflection of my values, which doesn’t mean that every book on my shelves is a reflection of my own opinion, because yes, I do value a diversity of opinion, but no, I do not feel obligated to support within my doors opinions that I find morally offensive. A bookstore is, of necessity, either a curated collection or an impersonal hodge-podge, and I like to think that mine is the former. I have, for instance, more books on agriculture and natural sciences than I have science fiction and fantasy, and that is solely a reflection of my personal interests, not a decision made on principle, but every new book I order is a choice I make. For me, it’s personal, and as long as I’m in business my choices will be mine to make, and they will continue to be personal.

Retracing One Path in Children’s Literature

What books were being given to boys and girls as Christmas presents in the year 1928? Many probably received a set of Book Trails. The first volume, Book Trails for Baby Feet, begins with “Little Black Sambo,” a story told in many different editions over the years and revived in three new versions not long ago. It’s a story that’s been loved and hated and that has given rise to legends in which some vague, powerful, conspiratorial “They” pull out all the stops to censor children’s literature by making the story unavailable.

Here are a few facts from the book world as I have come to know it.

·     Children’s books, read over and over and not always treated gently, tend to survive in smaller numbers than adult books, and a family of several children probably had no more than one copy of a beloved book when the children were small. The likelihood of that copy having survived is small.

·     Popular and well-loved children’s books, like other published titles, usually go out of print over time.

·     Why isn’t a popular book reprinted? Most publishers of children’s books are conservative business people. They do not want copyright problems, and they don’t want storms of social protest -- unless the storms are going to sell books.

But also –

·     Every year publishers are bringing out new titles for children.

·     Illustration styles change over the years, as do parenting methods.

·     Social awareness grows.

Does anyone think the Dick and Jane readers fell victim to censorship? Well, actually, a few people probably do think that, but evolving (or at least changing) theories of education are a more likely explanation. As for why Dick and Jane books and Little Black Sambo have commanded such high prices on the secondary (i.e., not new) book market for as long as I’ve been selling used books, the answer is simple: supply and demand. When people remember books from their own childhood, want to get their hands on the books again, and the desired titles are out of print and surviving copies in short supply, prices go up.

It is not a conspiracy. If booksellers were that canny, we would all be rich.

But those who object to the character of Little Black Sambo as depicted in the story have a serious point to make. The little black boy in the pictures presents a stereotype, as does his name and the names of his mother and father, and so the story fosters continued stereotypical thinking about darker races among young white readers, while showing young readers of color nothing they can recognize that relates to their own lives.

Growing social awareness is obvious in another book that came to my hand recently, Bright April, by Marguerite di Angeli.

As soon as the book is opened, the illustrated endpapers invite the reader into April’s world, Philadelphia’s Germantown following the close of World War II. We learn that she has a sister and two brothers, that her father is a postman, and that she belongs to a Brownie troop.

In this mid-century African-American family, April helps her father clear the sidewalk of ice and snow and helps her mother set the dinner table, always trying to live up to the secret Brownie motto, “D.Y.B.!” There are hints of difficulties to come when other little girls say unkind things or when April’s serviceman brother (the year is 1946) writes home that he has been assigned to laundry duty rather than given an architectural assignment for which he was educationally trained and eager to execute. Today, perhaps, April’s parents would give their children more emphatic, less gentle lessons, but de Angeli certainly left “Little Black Sambo” behind.

And yet, simply comparing these two fictional characters misses something else. “Little Black Sambo” and April Bright are completely different kinds of stories, just as “The Milkmaid and Her Pail,” by Aesop, another story in Baby Feet, is entirely different from an almost infinite number of realistic fiction for young people written in the 20^th century. Fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” feminists point out, gave starring roles to female stereotypes, not fully realized fictional girls and women. And what about all the charming princes? Ever meet one in real life who looked and talked and acted like the ones in fairy tales. And how about all the wicked stepmothers?

In fairy tales and fables the emphasis is on a simple plot, large actions, and lesson to be learned, while realistic fiction, for readers of all ages, present an ambiguous world peopled by distinct individuals trying to find their way in it.

Is there a place in our world today for fables and fairy tales? That’s a serious question. I wonder what others think. And where does contemporary YA dystopian literature fall with relation to fairy tales and realism?