The Seuss Six

We need to talk about the Seuss Six, and we need to do it no matter what you think of the 6 titles that were taken out of print.

I come at it as a librarian and a liberal (though some might decide that’s a lie by the end of this).

Just FYI, I do not need correcting about the legal definition of censorship, which I’m well aware of, and I do not need Educating about how a copyright holder deciding to take its own book out of print is not a ban.  I agree. 

I’ll say it though: the Seuss Six have been functionally banned.

And this isn’t about whether their content is unacceptable or ok.  That’s a whole discussion by itself — especially the part where you’re told you have to oppose all 6, and if you defend one you’re defending all 6, so shut up.

Different discussion, and I won’t say I’d be happy to, but I’m willing to write about it separately, if I can meet my personal standard that I do NOT review a book I haven’t read.  

To meet that standard I might need to win the lottery.  I started to write about the content, but found that the books were unaffordable, and the disturbing nature of that turned into this topic.

The phenomenon of huge numbers of copies, by any major author with decades of huge print runs, going behind a high and expensive wall is at this point a way bigger question.

When the end of their printings was announced, I heard lots of;

“Oh poo-poo, there are zillions of, decades of, copies out there, so if you’re such a Horrible Person that you won’t take our word for it, go buy a bunch like the wyt supremacist you obviously are.” 

It usually does work that way: Go out of print, shift to the used market, no biggie.

Instead, national retailers shun them, online sites refuse to let sellers list them (eBay) or have altered the used-copies search function to show the title but appear that no copies are available (Amazon).  How many shoppers will give the secret handshake?  AKA, will click anyway what looks like a none-in-stock title and discover that 3rd party sellers are now visible?  If you hit it in the right 10 minutes you might get a bargain at under $100.

Did leftists tell everybody to make a grab/hoard run on them and drive up the prices?  Did they tell big retailers to remove the leftover copies?  No.

Is it against some law to print/sell/own them?  Nope.  So we get the oft-repeated:

 “Only governments can censor because only governments can levy Legal Consequences!”

So   the   bleep   what?

The legal definition of censorship is still government suppression, but that power exists only on paper.  It’s toothless, and as meaningless as banning buggy whips for Teslas.   

Official government banning worked only when government entities had a prayer of controlling printing and distribution.  They arrested booksellers, raided print shops and confiscated or smashed costly room-sized presses.  Until after the civil war they could threaten a printer/publisher with loss of government license that allows them to be in business at all.  Feds raided post offices and confiscated shipments of forbidden books.

That’s history, and federal law might not find it worthwhile after the courtroom battles they lost - see Tropic of Cancer - but in fact they haven’t the power at all anymore. 

Have any of the people clinging to this moribund definition of censorship even noticed that home equipment and internet access to sellers and platforms have ended that almost entirely?  There’s a complete publishing setup, from creating, to mass producing hard copy and digital media, to distributing digitally, right there in your laptop bag next to your “Politically Correct just means being a good person” travel mug. 

I think they have noticed.  I think they know full well that they oppose official censorship, but like this new unofficial version that empowers “progressives” to make books that bother them — again, some with merit, some without — come as close as possible to disappearing.

The one arm of government censorship still extant is the ban on child p0rn and trafficking. Governments exert major resources to track that down and prosecute.  Good.  Special place in hell for the perpetrators. 

But in a world where anyone can run a publishing business on their couch and access a massive, uncontrollable web, it’s a gargantuan effort that nets a few gallons of the floodtide of the nasty stuff.  They couldn’t enforce religion book bans or sexual-explicitness book bans like they did in the days of the Reformation or the dreary Lady Chatterley, if they wanted to. 

Even in the old days governmentally banned books couldn’t be stopped.  Illicit books always snuck in in small quantities, and circulated through small dealers in small venues, with collector prices.  This Seuss phenomenon may not be an identical customer-access problem, but you can’t tell me the similarities aren’t strong, whether it’s law or public pressure driving it.  Fear drives it either way.

The First Amendment provides constitutional boundaries for government-wielded censorship efforts.  The Court of Public Opinion has no such boundaries. It does levy penalties, protests and boycotts, and there are reasons why a national company says:

“No, we’re right-thinking!  We sent the books away!  Please don’t boycott our website. Please don’t egg our store.”

No matter how we feel about the content of the Seuss Six, or of any other thing we genuinely think is welcome to disappear, most of us don’t want to reactivate those days of official censorship for it.  

Censorship cuts both ways. 

We don’t want censorship, but we don’t want to admit that the Court of Public Opinion has become effectively the real agent of just that.  We really really want to call this restriction on book access “the Free Market” so we can call it a good thing but still congratulate ourselves for being anti-censorship.

Government censorship gets its day in court, gets examined by constitutional standards, and overreach gets told to cease and desist.

That public opinion “Court” can be right or wrong.  Its wrong opinions carry the same authority to levy those penalties as its right ones do.  There’s no hearing, there’s no appeal to any section of the constitution.  There’s no process of legally codifying what must be silenced and why. 

It’s about widening the definition of what ideas should be stopped, by simple threat of economic ruin and vandalism.  It can put enough fear into big retail to get a book pulled.  It can vilify and shame anyone who questions whether a book deserves the criticism it gets, or who just wants to see it for themselves.

Dubious though this Court’s “shut up” tactics are, it has the right to Freedom of Speech.  I have the right to oppose it. 

This is not the free market.

This is artificial reduction of customer access and of customer demand, through shaming and pressure.  

I urge my fellow liberals to think twice about this legalistic rationalizing in which populist pressure to squelch materials is not just a-ok but unquestionable, while we’re proud to oppose government censorship — itself a petrified artifact of a bygone time.

 A book driven into the margins of retail and hard to get for less than $100 a pop occupies the same position that the officially banned books of times past occupied; available in quiet deals in small venues, at a high price.  I do not give a tenth of a crap about the 50+ year-old definition of what “banning” is.

A better class of dirty books

It's a real bummer to love old books, but to also want your books uncensored. I'd much rather have old editions, but such ribald luminaries as Pepys and Chaucer were, not impossible, but difficult to acquire in unexpurgated editions, for a very long time. It's pretty much a given that classics for home and school, printed by major mainstream publishing houses, were edited for "taste" until well into the 1960's.

You may or may not think that this loosening up of standards was good. But cleaning up an important classic can misrepresent it. It can, in fact, make a literary icon out of a child abuser, which Samuel Pepys pretty much was, at least on one occasion. That, by the way, I learned not from my smattering of Pepys-reading, but from Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which is a terrific book on the importance and context of Pepys.

The top 2 books in the stack pictured above are typical major-publisher editions, sanitized for general public consumption; one of Pepys and one of Chaucer. Both were published by Macmillan. Sets like the Macmillan "Globe Editions" were offered by many other major publishers and buyers expected the text to be nicened up. To sell the full version to typical buyers was to invite returns, outraged letters, boycotts, and, if ordered by mail, prosecution under the Comstock laws forbidding the use of the postal service to send "obscene" literature.



This bowdlerized 1912 Modern Reader's Chaucer is worth owning for the many gorgeous illustrations alone. The editors say that they have departed from the true text:

...only to save their version from one or another of four possible stumbling blocks: rhyme and excessive rhythm, obscurity, extreme verbosity, and excessive coarseness. Their rare omission of words or short passages for the last reason has not been indicated; in the still fewer cases where a whole episode is incurably gross or voluptuous (yet Chaucer is never merely vicious), its omission is shown by asterisks.

This, I swear, is called, right there on its title page, 

The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 

If you can say nothing else good about modern morals, you have to admit that we needed to get honest about the definition of "complete."

The top book is a 1925 Pepys. LOTS of the material is included, 775 pages of double-columned small print. However, its editor has not only cleaned it up, but by the way, admonishes you for your interest in the smutty parts:

There is a certain pleasure in discovering a secret, and especially in searching, with the victim's aid, the further corners of his character. This pleasure is at bottom quite legitimate. But the same cannot be said of the Peeping Tom habit which seeks its sole entertainment in the dishabille of the diarist and his companions, and by so seeking has given his record an unenviable notoriety.

Since the full diary is multiple volumes, abridgments were the norm anyway, but while publishers were editing for length, they chose to leave out not only bad behavior but also tame and rather touching domestic information, like, the couple's yet-again failure to conceive a child, as sadly noted by Samuel when Elizabeth Pepys' menstrual period appeared.

But nice old books can sometimes be uncensored. An eBay seller offered both the Boccaccio and the Defoe, there in that stack, and made it pretty clear to potential buyers that they were unedited, by showing a couple of the illustrations.

Something tells me this isn't the
Hearth And Home Classics For Family Edification...

Learning the book business and book history is a lengthy process, but these purchases furthered my education. The Boccaccio set is an English edition "privately printed" for the Navarre Society. That got me interested in this group, but I can't find much of anything about The Navarre Society except book dealers showing what they published. And that may be the story behind them, right there. Unexpurgated literary works, probably sold by subscription to Society members. And possibly shipped in sets via other freight methods, to avoid the postal service laws.

Defoe's Roxana is a US edition, for something called the Bibliophilist Society. Also no information about them, at least under my fairly quick search, but it's a good bet that they were the same kind of organization. Publishers of works, largely literary and classical, that you couldn't get on the general market.

When I saw them on eBay I expected a buyer to grab them fast, but they stayed unpurchased long enough for me to think it over multiple times before I gave in and hit "commit to buy."

So if you're looking for tame editions, get the old editions put out by mainstream publishers. If you want the uncensored version, you'll probably want a modern edition, but if you like vintage books, you might not always need to choose between vintage and uncensored. Old and often beautiful editions from publishers who catered to the Don't snip my books! crowd are out there.