Not Exactly Bonus Content: Consider The Banning of the Written Word - Issue #33
There have been several widely publicized efforts over the past few months to ban books in schools, libraries and other locations.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about this. Book banning here in the United States is an old and unfortunate tradition. For many years, The American Library Association has promoted a “Banned Book Week” and publishes a list of titles that have been banned in localities throughout the country.
I think it's an odd question in a country that says it values individual freedom. What is that line between the right to self expression and the values of the "community?" What are the responsibilities of the community to protect the right to seek out forms of "speech" that may clash with the "values" of the community?
And finally: Who in the "community" gets to say what the community values are in the first place? It sometimes seems like whoever shows up at the meeting with a pitchfork and a lighted torch gets that right.
The communities that are earning their scorn for banning books like “Maus” from their public school curriculums and libraries are missing a pretty key point here in the third decade of the 21st century:
There’s the internet out there and every single book they ban is available to the residents of that community to purchase in print in a store, have delivered to their home, downloaded from the web, or borrowed from a local library.
Well, What About Magazines?
In my mind, magazines are first cousins to books. Unlike a book, a magazine is not "one and done" (Yeah, I know, serials, trilogies, etc.). And as we've seen in some posts recently from others in the magazine world, a publication can live to be a hundred years old.
But just like their hard backed cousins, magazines can wind up being the source of debate in the public square.
Back when adult themed magazines were more of a thing, that debate centered on titles like Playboy and Penthouse.
Many years ago, when I represented national distributors and consulted for conglomerated media groups, I distinctly recall that many independent magazine wholesalers in my circuit sold a lot of copies of adult titles (Such as Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and others) to state and local jails to be sold in their canteens to the inmates. It was a huge source of circulation.
And of course, that outraged some folk who decided to take their complaints to the authorities and have those magazines taken away from the inmates.
In the retail sphere magazines used to get banned frequently. Although we called it a "delisting" as the magazine was taken off of the list of "authorized" titles. I once consulted for a skateboard publication that side-stepped their delistings by launching a second title considered its editorial “little brother” magazine. That way, the primary title maintained their "hardcore" editorial while the little brother's editorial was more mainstream.
Likewise, another former client, an alternative art magazine had to poly bag its chain bookstore edition because some customers had objected to the content. For several years the publisher took on this expense in order to service two of its most important chains.
Ironically, once the title was poly bagged, sales took off in those chains. Several years, after the furor had died down, the publisher was allowed to take the polybag off.
You guessed right: We took off the polybag and sales went down.
There is, however, a big difference between a school board or town council banning books or magazines vs. a retail company saying you can’t sell this book or magazine in the store. In the first instance, you are challenging the first amendment. In the latter, a private company has every right to determine what they will or will not sell in their stores.
Leaving aside the question of adult oriented content, I think book and magazine racks should display as wide a range of material as the store’s customer base will purchase. But I’m a sales and marketing guy and that’s what I do.
Every time I read about book banning or discover that a retailer has tossed out a magazine over “content” issues, I think about a book I loved as a small child: “Rabbit Hill”. The story is about a group of woodland animals that live near an estate house in rural Connecticut. One of the human characters is overheard by the animals to declare that the new residents of the house are not going to work out because they have a lot of books and “Reading rots the mind.”
That handyman was right, but not in the way he thought. Reading does rot the mind. It rots away ingrained habits, assumptions, hard edged belief systems. Reading will open you up to new things, ideas you hadn't thought of, people and places you've never seen or thought you could meet. A book or magazine can take you far away from a place you've been your entire life. You don't have to accept what you've read, join the movement that you are asked to be a part of. But at least you were exposed to it.
Seems like a decent sort of rot.