Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes.
So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money. Banned Books Week is part of the organization’s fall fundraising push. Every year, newspapers run earnest stories about the threat of censorship in the U.S. They praise the ALA’s courageous defense of freedom and include Amazon links to “banned” books. Donations to the ALA have increased by nearly 50% recently. American publishers, who had first suggested that the ALA run such a campaign in 1982,
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