Banned Book Week is now.  JMRL is teaming with Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech to bring the event to the First Amendment Monument on September 30.  Among other things there will be at 7 pm a film based on Ray Bradbury’s classic book on censorship and book burning.

The Banned Book partnership between these two organizations is not new, and last year the Virginia Library Association awarded the TJ Center the VLA / ProQuest Intellectual Freedom Award while JMRL won the VLA’s Banned Book display award.  The American Library Association is a main proponent of this event and supplies libraries with information and promotional materials.  Their Banned Book web page offers a wealth of information on the subject.

We have all read banned books, and books continue to be challenged or banned.  You can see what has happened to the classics that you have read on ALA’s “Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” link.  Pick up another one soon.  They have not diminished in intellectual value since being challenged and/or banned.

“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
– Oscar Wilde

“I don’t want to be shut out from the truth. If they ban books, they might as well lock us away from the world.”—Rory Edwards, 12, Washington Post, Getting It Down at Writing Camp.

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953.

“To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.” – Claude Adrien Helvetius, De l’ Homme.

“Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.” – Lyndon Baines Johnson, February 11, 1964.

~ The Reluctant Blogger