What's the occasion? Banned Books Week, which is being celebrated this week in Baylor University's library system. Although this is Baylor's first year to mark the occasion, the American Library Association has celebrated the freedom to read with the annual week for the last 25 years.
So why's Baylor so late jumping on the bandwagon? Baylor library officials say it was just a matter of having other things to do, like circulating 336,000 library items. Library staff began discussing the idea this year, however, after a lawsuit was threatened in Great Britain by wealthy Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz against the publisher of Alms for Jihad: Charity & Terrorism in the Islamic World. Before the suit reached court, Cambridge Press sent up the white flag, announcing in July that it was not only recalling all copies in bookstores but was asking that libraries remove the book from shelves.
So what happened here at Baylor? Pattie Orr, dean of libraries, tells us they're not about to return the book. As she put it to a Baylor Lariat reporter, Alms for Jihad would be removed from Baylor shelves "over my dead body."
Have any materials on Baylor shelves inspired local protests? Not in recent memory. "We don't have that many, surprisingly," longtime Baylor librarian Kathy Hillman said. "A number of years ago, we had somebody question whether the bookstore should sell Pravda."
Surely, some library materials have sparked controversy. "We used to keep some books on a sex shelf behind the service desk, but that stopped years ago," Hillman says. "And then there was a to-do about a swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated that some people thought we were censoring, but we weren't. By the time we bought the fifth issue, the problem was really how to keep it safe."
So how is Baylor commemorating Banned Books Week? Selections will be read from famously banned books during brown bag lunches at noon today, Wednesday and Friday in the Harvey Garden of the Moody Memorial Library on campus. All are invited.
What books are being read aloud? Selections from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Pattie Orr is taking special pleasure in reading from Alms for Jihad at high noon today.
Were any of these books ever banned from Baylor shelves? Not exactly, Hillman says. The Baylor library reportedly was slow in purchasing once-controversial John Steinbeck classics like The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. Reason: During the Great Depression, when these works were published, scholars weren't as inclined toward homegrown, all-American writing of the period, so Baylor officials invested what little money they had in classics from other parts and other times. To hear Hillman, Steinbeck's classics on hard times in America had to await better times in the land of plenty.
— Tribune-Herald staff reports