When the owners of a Tennessee comics shop learned that a local school board had voted to remove Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust classic Maus from its curriculum, they sprang into action with an appeal calling for donations to fund free copies for schoolchildren.
Within hours, money started pouring in from all over the world. “We had donations from Israel, the UK and Canada as well as from the US,” says Richard Davis, co-owner of Nirvana Comics.
Ten days later, they closed the appeal, after raising $110,000 (£84,000) from 3,500 donors. “We bought up all the copies the publisher had in its warehouse and we’re now in the process of shipping 3,000 copies of Maus to students all over the country, along with a study guide written by a local schoolteacher,” says Davis, who has relied on volunteers to help with the distribution.
For Spiegelman, it has meant an exponential sales boost for a 30-year-old book – the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize, in 1992 – and a flurry of speaking engagements across the country. “It just shows,” he says, “you can’t ban books unless you’re willing to burn them and you can’t burn them all unless you’re willing to burn the writers and the readers too.”
That’s just as well, adds the 74-year-old cartoonist, “because this is the most Orwellian version of society I’ve ever lived in. It’s not as simple as left v right. It’s a culture war that’s totally out of control. As a first-amendment fundamentalist, I believe in the right of anyone to read anything, provided they are properly supported. If a kid wants to read Mein Kampf, it’s better to do it in a library or school environment than to discover it on Daddy’s shelves and be traumatised.”
Unfortunately, there is an unprecedented rise in attempts to remove books from the US’s libraries and schools. The American Library Association (ALA) told the Guardian that in the period from 1 September to 30 November, more than 330 unique cases were reported – more than double the number for the whole of 2020, and nearing the total for the previous (pre-pandemic) year.
“It’s definitely getting worse,” says Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the free-speech organisation PEN America, which has led the resistance against book banning for more than a decade. “We used to hear about a book challenge or ban a few times a year. Now it’s every week or every day. We also see proposed legislative bans, as opposed to just school districts taking action. It is part of a concerted effort to try to hold back the consequences of demographic and social change by controlling the narratives available to young people.”
Predominantly, the ALA reported, the challenges were targeted at “the voices of the marginalised … books and resources that mirror the lives of those who are gay, queer or transgender, or that tell the stories of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of colour”. Or, as Spiegelman says, of his own experience: “If I was a transgender Black great-grandchild of slaves, I’d be more likely to be banned. This feels like a drive-by shooting.”
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Reedin and stuff
Reedin and stuff
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”