Abstract
Commuters read their tablets while travelling on the New York subway
Credit: Gianni Muratore / Alamy Stock Photo
Reading controversial books in public places can be risky.
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By the same standards, owning a book surely does not mean you share all views within it. Yet this age-old problem hasn’t gone away. All across the world possessing a book, even temporarily, can be enough to get you into serious trouble.
The cases range from the absurd to the horrific. In the UK in September a student at Staffordshire University was questioned by suspicious library staff when he was spotted reading a book on terrorism: he was enrolled in their terrorism, crime and global security programme. A few months earlier in Angola, a book club was raided and its participants jailed for reading a book on non-violent resistance by Nobel Prize nominee Gene Sharp. Six months later, the book club members remain in jail.
Books scare people. Books have always scared people. Pope Francis recently wrote a prologue to a youth version of the Bible, saying it remains “a highly dangerous book – so dangerous that you are treated in some countries as if you were hiding hand grenades in your closet”. The same applies to many religious texts worldwide. From scriptures to self-help books to political tomes and porn, there are a lot of books hidden in closets or turned with spines facing inwards.
Asking around friends and colleagues in the UK, one admitted he has a copy of Mein Kampf, tucked firmly out of sight at home lest anyone jump to the wrong conclusions. Another remembers doing research in the British Library in the 1980s, and having to consult on controversial titles at the “special materials” desk. “It was like the naughty books’ section,” he said. “There you sat, under the beady eye of a stern-looking librarian who you imagined to be making all sorts of judgements on your proclivities. The two books that saw me cast into the side area were Thongs by Scottish author Alexander Trocchi, a 1955 novel about a woman’s sexual journey which would probably seem quite tame today, and, more inexplicably, a book on the tarot, which came with a pack of cards.”
At the British Library’s new premises in King’s Cross, a desk for consulting on restrictive items still exists, but many of the controversial books have migrated, as tastes and social values have moved on. Anne O Nomis, an art historian who writes under a pseudonym, visited the library to research her 2013 book, The History & Arts of the Dominatrix. She sought out a copy of the Index Librorum Probibitum (Index of Forbidden Books), which had been compiled by Henry Spencer Ashbee, a Victorian gentleman with a secret obsession for erotomania. After dying in 1900, Ashbee donated all his books to the British Library’s “private case”, which could only be accessed by upper-class men. “Women and the lower classes,” wrote Nomis, “were protected (banned) from the private case books, as it was believed they would be corrupted.” The book is now kept in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room, along with other titles subject to restrictions on access, either because they contain sensitive material or are particularly vulnerable to theft or damage.
Today e-books have, of course, made clandestine reading easier. There is a reason the erotic potboiler Fifty Shades of Grey is the all-time best-selling Kindle title: people want to indulge in a guilty pleasure unseen by anyone else.
In Iran, where it’s less a question of embarrassment and more a question of avoiding punishment by the state, secretive reading is the norm. “E-books have brought this black market into people’s homes, or even the palm of their hands,” said James Marchant, lead researcher on Writer’s Block, a report about literary censorship in Iran by London-based NGO Small Media. “People [in Iran] probably aren’t going to pull out a copy of The Satanic Verses on a public bus, but within private spaces people are quite relaxed about reading banned books. Dodging censorship has been pretty much normalised over the past few decades.”
Iran was an early adopter of e-books. Azadeh Iravani, director of Nogaam Publishing, an online publishing platform that works to publish and freely distribute the work of censored Iranian authors online, said: “In the first years of the internet, people managed to produce scanned copies of books and either put them online, or sent them to their friends via email – and that’s still the case for many readers.” Nogaam celebrates its third anniversary in December; its published works cover topics such as gender equality, religious taboos, LGBT issues and underground music.
Some people decide to go further underground, to buy books anonymously, turning to the marketplaces of the so-called dark web. Here every book you can imagine (and many you can’t) has been uploaded and readers can browse anonymously.
Australian journalist Eileen Ormsby, the author of Silk Road, a book about the notorious dark-net marketplace of the same name, told Index she could see the appeal of dark-web libraries, even though many titles they carry seem innocuous to readers living in countries with less restrictive laws. “Having access to one uncensored library must have been pretty enlightening or liberating for people living under hostile regimes,” she said.
Ormsby’s first purchase on the dark web using crypto-currency Bitcoin was a collection of “banned books”. She said: “They turned out to be not that banned at all – classics like The Anarchist Cookbook, and a few badly-written tomes on ‘how to disappear’ and ‘techniques for silent killing’. Basically, stuff you can get on any clear-web torrent.”
The Silk Road marketplace was shut down by the FBI in 2013 (and version 2.0 in 2014) – primarily for its role in the drug trade. Ross William Ulbricht, believed to be the site’s founder Dread Pirate Roberts, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in February 2015. Since the closure, Silk Road’s own book club has acquired a near-mythical status. Dread Pirate Roberts began the book club with the statement: “Knowledge is power, and reading is one of the best ways to expand your knowledge.”
Alex Winter, the US actor and filmmaker who made the 2015 documentary Dark Web, told Index that the group was “like any community book club”. He said: “Its purpose was social and communal, not subversion. There was a lot of discussion of Austrian economics and other libertarian philosophies that were at the root of the Silk Road. It was the sort of fair that fit the participants, who were largely young, educated and engaged.”
The Silk Road crew were not hunted down for the books they read, but they shared certain characteristics with the members of the Angolan book club.
Predictably, the Angolan regime’s approach has backfired. The book they feared has now been picked up by Tinta da China, a small publisher in Portugal, which will be translating it into Portuguese, with proceeds of book sales going to the 15 young people jailed and to their families. Tinta da China has already faced a bitter court case with the Angolan government after publishing an exposé of the country’s blood diamond industry by Index on Censorship award winner Rafael Marques de Morais.
Tinta da China’s director, Bárbara Bulhosa, told Index: “These young men were arrested for discussing a book, a manual about peaceful strategies on moving from dictatorship to democracy. We have to be at their side and show support, and as a publisher, we felt this was the most effective way.”
People read to gain knowledge, and should not be judged for what they read. We should be prepared to defend readers and their right to read books, even those we, or they, might disagree with. The act of reading is not an endorsement.