Banned Books: A Tale As Old As Time

March 03, 2025

This text is an overview of the history of book banning.

The act of banning books is hardly a new phenomenon. Throughout history, books have been suppressed, banned, and even burned for reasons such as political, religious, or simply in the name of protecting kids from content that was deemed “obscene” or “inappropriate”. But where did it all begin? And what can we learn by looking at the long history of book banning?

Books have been around for a really long time, and book bans – well, probably for almost as long. ILAB (International League of Antiquarian Booksellers) writes that as far back as in ancient Rome, poet Ovid was banished from the city and his text, Ars Amatoria (eng. The Art of Love) was banned for its raunchy content and promotion of adultery. While there were likely other factors influencing the poet’s forced exile as well (such as possibly not being on the best of terms with emperor Augustus), there is no doubt that the book was controversial – so much, in fact, that it was famously burned by Savonarola in Italy 1400 years later. By 1930, the book was still causing controversy as an English translation was banned by U.S Customs, making Ovid’s love manual a strong contender for the award of history’s most long-lasting book ban.

According to Gutman Library, a part of Harvard University, the first American book ban (in the modern sense of the word- read more about different types of book bans here) is believed to have taken place in Massachusetts in 1637. Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, which criticized Puritan leadership to the point of comparing leaders to crustaceans (such as nicknaming one of his foes “Captaine Shrimp”), caused an outrage and was consequently banned, while the author was effectively exiled from Massachusetts for the rest of his life. National Geographic, meanwhile, mentions William Pynchon’s 1650 pamphlet The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption as the first known instance of what we would consider a modern, formal book ban – again, for challenging Puritan beliefs. Regardless of which was actually the first proper book ban, we see a pattern emerge; in the 17th century, book bans were all about religion.

Fast forward to the 19th century … and while religion was still a widespread reason for book banning, another issue now appears to come into focus: slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1851 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was famously both banned and burned, and during the Civil War in the 1860’s, both sides banned literature that promoted the views of the other. The 1800’s were also very particular about morality, especially concerning sexuality and religious piety, which led to banning books with “immoral” content. In fact, as National Geographic points out, the Comstock Act of 1873 meant that owning or sending such books was now a criminal offense.

The 20th century, then, saw a wide range of shifting attitudes towards book banning. While the rigorous moral codes of the 1800’s eased up, the World Wars brought propaganda and political persecution and consequently a variety of other reasons for banning books. The interwar period and World War II in particular meant that any books opposing Nazi Germany or its views lived a very dangerous existence. According to Nsdoku München, the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, there were about 100 public burnings of “un-German” literature recorded between March and October of 1933; the particular date alone of May 10, 1933 saw as many as 25,000 books being destroyed in university towns all over the country, according to Holocaust Encyclopedia. The phenomenon of books being targeted during war has persisted long since. For instance, in 1992, the Bosnian war caused between 1,5 and 3 million books in the Sarajevo National Library to be destroyed by Serbian troops, making it one of modern history’s most extensive book burnings, according to the website "Freedom to Read".

And what about our time? Looking up from history to peek instead at our present day, we’ll notice that book banning is far from a thing of the past. PEN America’s “Index of School Book Bans 2023-2024”, comprising more than 10,000 instances where access to certain books in American school libraries has been limited or removed, reminds us that books are still being deemed as objects to be controlled and/or withheld. Book burnings, too, still happen around the world today, for different political purposes. In Scandinavia, we need to look no further than Rasmus Paludan’s Quran burnings, which began in 2019, caused a global outrage and highlighted the symbolic status of books as carriers of ideology, religion, and values. The burning of a book, in Paludan’s case as well as in Germany in 1933, was less about the book itself and more about the political message signaled by the action. The book, then, becomes a stand-in for something larger than itself, and that’s why book bans and burnings need to be seriously addressed. After 2,000 years of exiles, bans and burnings, we can conclude that the written word holds a very special kind of power – one that frightens and provokes, but one that also gives a voice to the oppressed, provides a space for ideas to grow, and bears witness of the way the world once was.

Sources:

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=1269000&p=9306840

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/americas-first-banned-book

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/history-of-book-bans-in-the-united-states

https://ilab.org/article/the-longest-banned-book

https://www.nsdoku.de/en/historic-site/koenigsplatz/book-burnings-1933

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/resources/bannings-and-burnings-in-history/

https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-bans-2023-2024/