"Prizing" books as an unintended consequence of censorship

  Kidd, K. (2009). “Not censorship but selection”: Censorship and/as prizing. Children’s Literature in Education, 40(3), 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9078-4

Kidd’s theoretical and critical essay offers a brief history of censorship, book banning practices, and anticensorship in the USA. Most censorship efforts are tied to obscenity, be it pornographic, racist, violent, etc., and bans on children’s books are mostly motivated by the idea of contaminating the youth. Kidd examines the history of literary prizes in connection to book challenges. Kidd claims that book challenges can spark anticensorship efforts that lead to “prizing” of a book, whether the title merits the attention or not. He concludes that the worst thing that could happen to a book is non-attention which results in a book just fading away into the stacks. This article reveals the central role that libraries, librarians, and their selection policies have on anticensorship practices that have become especially important in the past 30 years. Another interesting point of the article is the analysis of censors and anticensors, which Kidd explains as two extremes always “othering” one another, both of which increase attention on a given title. I completely agree that a book disappearing into the stacks is the ultimate "death" of the book. It's interesting to think about how censorship efforts actually bring more attention to books, and I am curious if efforts by adults to censor books leads to the intended audience having more interest in reading the book in question.