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Verboten
Valuables
The FCC has sure been busy threatening, censoring,
and banning lately. Ironically, at the same time,
Portland's "Everybody Reads" campaign is featuring
Fahrenheit
451. It's amazing to think that with 451
in-print for over fifty years there would still
be a mass movement to ban and censor media and
literature. Thousands of books, from Huck
Finn to Harry
Potter, are still routinely banned in schools
across the country. From a collectible standpoint,
it only makes early editions of these titles more
interesting to own.
A few books are musts in this category, representing
watersheds in the history of literary censorship.
James
Joyce's most famous novel was banned in the
United States for eleven years on the grounds
that it may cause readers to have "impure and
lustful thoughts." Today, Ulysses
comes complete with a transcript of the historic
1933 court decision lifting the ban on its import.
Surprisingly, Nabokov's
controversial masterpiece, Lolita,
was never officially banned by the United States
government. After being turned down by four American
publishers, Olympia Press in France, who'd published
such subversive writers as Samuel
Beckett, Georges
Bataille, and the Marquis
de Sade, agreed to take a chance. Banned in
France and New Zealand shortly afterward, it rose
to the bestseller lists as soon as it hit American
shores.
In 1957 City Lights Bookstore proprietor Lawrence
Ferlinghetti was indicted for refusing to
discontinue sales of Allen
Ginsberg's Howl.
A first edition of this pamphlet is a real rarity
and will leave your pockets with plenty of room
for your hands, but the more
moderately priced second edition passes through
from time to time and other
early editions are quite reasonable.
Naked
Lunch was forced to defend itself on trial
in 1965. An almost surreal "what is art" debate
ensued and in the end, with a little help from
its friends Ginsberg and Norman
Mailer, Naked Lunch was ruled good,
clean fun.
Collecting is often about one's own personal
taste — books that, for whatever reason,
have great meaning to an individual. But, books
that have been brought to trial are collectible
for other reasons, not only because of their part
in literary history, but cultural history, as
well.
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