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Book censorship is focus of library exhibit
Andrea
Lynn , Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@illinois.edu
12/17/02
CHAMPAIGN,
Ill. — What do Madonna and the Bible have in common? What about
the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the boxing legend Muhammad Ali?
They
all have been victims of censorship.
As a new exhibit at the University of Illinois Rare Book and Special
Collections (RBSC) Library demonstrates, nothing is immune from the
censors’ bans, whiteouts, ink blots and razor blades.
All of the items in the exhibit, titled "An Epigraph for Condemned
Books Around the World," are drawn from the collections of the
RBSC Library. Items span 400 years of censorship history. The exhibit,
in Room 346 of the University Library, 1408 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana,
is free and open to the public. It runs through Feb. 7.
The exhibit begins with Baudelaire’s literary nightmare over "Les
Fleurs du Mal" (The Flowers of Evil), a book of his poetry published
in 1857; 1,300 copies were printed and sold for 3 francs apiece. Within
nine days of publication, France’s daily newspaper, Le Figaro,
was attacking four of the poems in "Les Fleurs" for emphasizing
lesbianism and realism; the article also called for the French Minister
of Justice to intervene.
The French government soon thereafter seized copies of the book, citing
the 1819 "lois de Serre," which established penalties ranging
from fines to imprisonment for publishing material that the court deemed
"an outrage to public and religious morality, or to good morals."
A provision of the law allowed for suppressing and destroying the writing
in question. The laws were applied not to the literary work as a whole,
but to offending passages or words.
Ultimately, the court rejected all counts purporting offenses against
religion and most counts on offenses against public morality for the
13 poems originally incriminated.
Six poems, however, were judged to be indecent. The court ordered that
they be deleted from future copies. Baudelaire was fined 300 francs,
which later was reduced to 50 francs after a high profile member of
French royalty interceded for him.
Nearly 100 years later, the court’s judgment against Baudelaire
was vacated and the poet was vindicated. At that point, the six banned
poems could then be included in new editions of "Les Fleurs du
Mal." The exhibit includes an early edition of the contested book
and various later editions, including copies signed by Baudelaire.
The Rare Book and Special Collections Library collects banned material
within a broad context, said Barbara Jones, the head of the RBSC Library
and curator of the exhibit. In her research she specializes on the First
Amendment.
Among
other things, the RBSC Library owns a large number of materials about
Theodore Dreiser, the American novelist who took a great deal of heat
for his references in "An America Tragedy" to pregnancy out
of wedlock and to what then was considered explicit descriptions of
sexual activity. Dreiser materials belong to the RBSC Library’s
Hugh C. Atkinson Collection of Theodore Dreiser.
But the library’s "core" collection on censorship is
the Ewing Baskette Collection.
Baskette, a native of Clarksville, Tenn., studied law and library science
at Vanderbilt and Columbia universities. His last position was at the
Illinois State Library in Springfield.
The bibliophile focused his book collecting on the topic of civil liberties
after reading about the Scopes "monkey" trial in Tennessee.
The Library purchased his collection after his death in 1958.
The Baskette Collection on Freedom of Expression contains original materials
from radical movements, clipping files, court cases from famous civil
liberties trials and books on controversial topics. It is one of the
most heavily used resources in the Rare Book and Special Collections
Library.
Other items in the current exhibit include:
- Editions of several books and passages that the Roman Catholic Church
forbade its followers to read. The Church began publishing lists of
banned books in 1564, and updated them regularly until the mid-20th
century.
- Editions of books censored by Soviets, including Volume 5 of the "Great
Soviet Encyclopedia," published in 1949. The volume had just
been mailed to subscribers when the Soviet censors were ordered to
remove references to Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s former head of
the Soviet secret police who had fallen out of favor.
"The publisher sent notices to librarians all over the world, asking them to remove pages referring to Beria," Jones said, "and they were told to substitute pages about the Bering Sea."
Librarians at Illinois recall that razor blades were sent along with the directive and new pages from Moscow. Their decision was to "tip in" the substitute pages, and to leave in the pages dealing with Beria.
- Copy of Madonna’s controversial coffee-table book, "Sex,"
published in 1992, and a large collection of items relating to various
efforts to ban or remove the book from bookstores and libraries.
- Copy
of the "Stam Geneva Bible," which probably was translated
by the English community in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1560. It also
is called the "breeches Bible" because of its famous translation
of Genesis 3:7, which has Adam and Eve sewing fig leaves together
to make trousers, called breeches. England’s crown and church
prohibited the publication of this Bible.
"The brand of Protestantism represented in the Geneva Bible was not to James I’s liking," Jones said. Meanwhile, Archbishop Abbot would not accept it because it omitted the Apocrypha – the 14 books of the Septuagint – which Puritans did not use. Because of these considerable roadblocks, the Geneva Bible had to be smuggled into England.
"The
Holy Bible is probably the most censored text of all time," Jones
said. "A clandestine printing business grew up around the Bible
soon after the Protestant Revolution."
The RBSC Library owns hundreds of Bibles, Jones said, which is a great
advantage for scholars who need to compare copies to see what changes
were made by which printers "in accordance with governmental dictates
of the times."
Heather B. Zinger, a UI senior, designed the exhibit.
