Saturday, July 9, 2011

the National Library of Scotland is holding a banned books exhibition


The National Library of Scotland, website, is holding an exhibition of banned books until 31 October.  As the website says, for as long as there have been books there has been book censorship. 

Anything which challenged the notions of those in power was (and still is) unlikely to be tolerated by totalitarian regimes and the Nazis banned books by Jewish authors per se. In Godzone, authorities slavishly followed the decisions of UK censorship powers, which in most cases was to do with sex. (In the book Celluloid Dreams there is a chapter on film censorship in NZ to the mid-1990s.)  The most entertaining case in the UK involved D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, when a coalition of people from across the spectrum decided that official prudishness had gone too far.  The court hearings have since been dramatised for TV a few times.

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