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.
