Which books were banned - and why

The first charge was against faith. The Vatican kept its own list of banned publications for more than four centuries. It included Galileo's "Dialogue," condemned at his 1633 trial; books by Descartes and Hume; and Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," though, never made the list. It was not science itself that was banned, but claims that challenged the Church's explanation of the world and humanity's place in it.

The second charge was rebellion: texts that could incite readers against the authorities were seized and sometimes burned in public, as in Germany in May 1933. The third was obscenity, and it most closely tracked each era's idea of propriety. In 1857, French prosecutor Ernest Pinard tried two books at once: "Madame Bovary" and "The Flowers of Evil." Flaubert was acquitted; Baudelaire was fined, and six poems were removed from the collection - the ban on them was lifted only in 1949.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was pulled from shelves almost as soon as it came out: in March 1885, Concord's library committee deemed the novel crude and fit only for the slums. A hundred years later, the book began to be removed again - this time from school curricula, over a racial slur repeated more than 200 times in the text.

The charges are opposite, but the motive is the same: to protect readers from harm. Only what counts as harm at that moment changes. That is why a banned-books list tells you more about the people who made it than about the books on it.

You have probably noticed that arguments over books today do not begin at a ministry, but in a school chat or at a library board meeting. And a complaint rarely comes from someone who read the book and was offended: more often, it is a ready-made list of titles from someone else's campaign.

For four centuries, the key decision was made before printing: a censor or church commission stamped its approval, and the book simply never came out. The current wave works the other way around - the book is published, debated after release, and the decision can be challenged and the book returned to the shelf. That does not mean state censorship has disappeared: in many countries, a government agency still approves the list of banned works.

And one more thing list-makers usually regret. In 1960, a British court allowed "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to be published uncut - 200,000 copies of the first print run sold out in a day. The trial worked as advertising.