On June 25, 1953, a group of librarians and publishers issued a statement affirming the right of Americans to read freely. But that right has been challenged continually over the decades, including right now.
Within the last several years, there’s been a surge in efforts across the country to challenge and remove books from library shelves. According to an analysis by PEN America, a free speech advocacy group, book bans have been reported in over 30 states – although most instances are concentrated in just five: Florida, Missouri, Utah, South Carolina and Texas.
Many of the book challenges commonly target reads about race, racism, or LGBTQ characters or themes. But in some places, those challenges have expanded to include titles that discuss grief and loss, violence, and adolescent health and well-being.
"You know, Judy Blume has had a lasting staying power because she was willing to write books about things that she knew young people had questions about, and weren't always seeing themselves reflected in the books of that time," said Diane Lapierre, executive director of Poudre Libraries. "Very often, a book is a very safe way for a kid or an adult to get information about things they are curious about."
Banned Books Week was developed as a way to celebrate the freedom to read and to draw attention to censorship efforts. For librarians and book fans alike, the honorary week feels especially weighty this year on the 70th anniversary of the issuing of the Freedom to Read statement.
For Lapierre, the week is an important acknowledgement of our First Amendment rights, and the critical role of libraries in defending intellectual freedom and the right to read. She spoke with In The NoCo ahead of Banned Books Week, October 1 to 7.
Interview highlights
These interview highlights have been lightly edited for length and clarity
Erin O'Toole: Book banning is not a new phenomenon. It seems to come and go in waves. Could you talk about sort of where we are at this moment in time?
Diane Lapierre It's definitely on top of our radar right now. I got my library degree over 30 years ago, so I feel like I've been through some different waves of book challenges, and I think we are in one of those just really intense periods right now where people are questioning what kinds of books should be on library shelves and have new tools to organize across the country to make a more concerted effort to challenge books. It was more localized in the past. So those are some of the differences that I see this time around.
O'Toole: Is that something that's concerning to you, this sort of coordinated effort that we keep reading about where one person, you know, writes in about 60 books or something?
Lapierre: Yes. Because at heart, I feel like our public libraries should serve the communities that they're in and be responsive to the people who live here. And I think it's sometimes hard to cut through what is happening more at a national level, or with small groups of people who have more extreme views, that really don't reflect the heart of our community. And so, trying to kind of be responsive to our customers who walk through our doors, who recommend books, who have questions about eBooks. We absolutely want to have conversations with those people. But there is a lot of noise out there that's coming from outside of our community that it's hard to kind of have reasonable conversations with people about.
O'Toole: So when we talk about banning a book, what actually happens here? I feel like it starts with a challenge to a book. What needs to happen before it gets yanked off the shelf?
Lapierre: So we're fortunate in our community. We have people who want to talk to our frontline staff about the books they see on the shelf, or about the books they don't see on the shelves. I'd say even before it gets to a challenge, we have lots of great conversations with people who request books or have questions about books. But if somebody does see a title or hears about a title that they think we shouldn't have in the library, they fill out a form. And that's a challenge typically at that level and we respond to it.
Our collection development librarians and I have policies, procedures, approaches that we use to evaluate our books and will respond to that to the customer. I have been in the library profession for a long time, and it's very rare that we would actually take a book off the shelf in response to a person who didn't feel it was appropriate. Often we may shift a book that was in one section of the library to another section of the library. Occasionally we have an old edition of a book or we have information that's no longer accurate or valid, and there's new information we should have on the shelf. So sometimes we do make a decision to move a book or get a newer edition or a different title in addition to what we have. But rarely do we actually ban a book.
Now, that's here. That's not the situation that's happening in a lot of other parts of our country right now, where library boards and school districts are making decisions to remove those books from their shelves.
I really strongly believe that once you've taken that voice off the shelves, even if it was something that I personally found horribly offensive, I no longer have the ability to think critically about those topics and those ideas.
O'Toole: Is there an instance you can think of where a book should be banned?
Lapierre: I like to say no. I mean, in a in a sort of perfect world, no. You know, if a community really felt like a title was outside of the values that they want to have on their shelves and available to the public, I mean, that's not my decision to make for another library. That's my decision to make for this library, this library system. And you know, just reading a book doesn't necessarily make you change your values and your experience, but it may make you see things a different way and want to read more about it and learn more about it.
O'Toole: It sounds like it really comes down to the community and the library's place within that community.
Lapierre: Absolutely. And in Fort Collins, we have, you know, a community steeped in education. We have a college university presence here. And I think we are intellectually curious and I hope we're the kind of community that can continue to respect other people's ideas and perspectives. We don't have to all agree with everything all the time. In fact, that would be quite boring. Having more discussion is really the answer, I feel, to censorship — not quieting voices or taking materials off the shelves.
O'Toole: I feel like in Colorado we're a little luckier right now that this book banning trend isn't really playing out here the way it is in some other states. But are you concerned by any communities here in Colorado?
Lapierre: Well, again, it's up to those communities to make those decisions for themselves. But, you know, we had last year concerns around book banning in Wellington. And the town board took a stance that they were not in the business of banning books. That wasn't what they saw, their role in the community. Douglas County is having a lot of conversations about that with their library right now. You know, library directors have a big part in this, but really the library boards are the governing policymaking entities for a lot of our libraries. And they reflect the needs and desires of the community.
So, yeah, it is happening in Colorado, not on the sort of a statewide basis that's happening in some different states in the country, where they're passing legislation to make school libraries and even public libraries remove titles, and having librarians being held personally liable for checking out books that have been determined by somebody to be harmful to somebody else.
O'Toole: That feels like it’s putting librarians on the front lines of these sort of culture wars.
Lapierre: Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think that's a place that librarians or teachers or doctors or, you know, a lot of people in these professions that are serving their communities feel comfortable being. So we're trying to do what we can in Fort Collins, in northern Colorado, in Poudre Libraries to support not just our professionals who work in our libraries, but folks in communities where they may not have a strong voice.
O'Toole: So it sounds like it's coming back to the concept of intellectual freedom.
Lapierre: It is exactly the idea of intellectual freedom to make sure that our First Amendment rights are valued and recognized. That's the freedom to speak. It's the freedom to read, to think for yourself, and to have that access to information, to really have a robust marketplace of ideas.
