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Libraries can and do choose what books to keep in their collection. If a library chooses not to acquire a book, that isn't necessarily `banning'. If I write a book on dog poop art, a library may well decide that nobody is going to want to read it, and that acquiring the book would be a waste of budget and of shelf space.

Banning can best be thought of as external. If a library has a book, and a politician (e.g., library board or school board member) demands the book be removed, that is a call for the book to be banned.

Not all banning is external, to be sure. A library that refused to acquire books of interest to people of color, or to LGBTs, can definitely be said to be banning books. Librarians I have known have pretty much all had the opinion that, as much as possible, acquisitions should be responsive to the needs of the community, and would not be supportive of policies like that.

As for the Turner Diaries, I'd echo the OP that, even if a library chose to include it in its collection (and thus spend money on it that would not be available to spend on other books), it should be held in a Special Collections division, available only on request. But my guess is that my dog poop art book would get more circulation than the Turner Diaries.

Where is the line between banning and just not caring about a book? I have written a book of my own. No library in the world has it. No publisher chose to pick it up. Does that mean I am the most "banned" author in the world? Or maybe people have deemed that what I wrote is just not worth their time?

The line is drawn by what you think the underlying motive is or would be. If you asked the BPL to host your book our shared assumption is that they would decline because they don't have infinite space and there are a large number of books out there. If their reasoning was that they thought your content was offensive or would inspire bad things in your audience then we would consider them to be "banning" your book.

So then how do you know which one of these it was when you apply your test?

I don't know. I just guess.

It's not a completely random guess. Context informs the guess. For example, all the examples they give, and the books I saw when I scrolled through the underlying list their article is based on, seem to be about and banned for having gay sex, sexual abuse of children, sex with children, and racism. If they were equally interested in all banned books I think it would be an odd coincidence for all of their examples to be in that narrow range of topics. There are no books about how to run drug labs, commit genocide, or burn heretics among their examples? Odd...

Most of the latter... aren't banned? Like, at all. They aren't so popular, but you can definitely find books on chemical synthesis in libraries.

What? Those two things are on complete opposite poles!

When you ban something, you care about it so much that you take a hard stance against it, thus the ban.

Just a guess, but I suspect a book gets banned because it's well known; it has content judged as immoral, unnecessarily sexual, etc.; and parents in an area suspect that teachers or librarians will try to convey the book to their children against the parents wishes. They thus take action through their school boards to draw a perfectly clear line.

BPL is not subject to any of those jurisdictions, so they're legally untouchable as they do the same work of trying to undermine those parents.

I'm glad you didn't use loaded language there.

I'm guessing that you're being sarcastic, though I'm not sure which language you're pointing out.

> The reason I like to use this as a litmus test is that people often say something like "I'm against banning books" but what they mean is "I am for things I like".

I am positive that 98%+ of people that state the former mean the former.

I'm positive that most people who mean the former will backpedal, provide conditions and loopholes, or become outright angry and start calling you a nazi if you make them actually think about it.

Sounds like you spend a lot of time arguing online. That's bound to give you a horribly skewed view of "most people".

The Turner Diaries is, I think, a poor choice of litmus test for this. It was never picked up by a major publisher, and was basically always self-published as far as I know. Wikipedia gives an estimate of 200k-500k copies sold, total, since 1978: that’s not a lot!

Libraries do have to make curatorial choices about what to stock, both physically and digitally. So it’s not surprising a lot of libraries don’t stock a book that was never widely published or sold many copies, regardless of political connotations. And as controversial books go, I don’t think the Turner Diaries is one of the ones that necessarily merits wider availability for “historical interest”. I’ve never read it, maybe you have, but from I understand it’s not even a particularly interesting book it itself, only for it’s connection to some right-wing terrorists like McVeigh. The fact it never sold much sort of indicates not many people want to read it, a good reason not to carry it!

And for ebooks in particular, it’s worth remembering most libraries (including Brooklyn) outsource their digital catalog to a third party provider. So their curatorial choices are potentially limited by that as well. Again, self published book never widely published or sold: not surprising to me that the major ebook providers for libraries might not have it.

As a litmus test against your litmus test, it’s worth noting that the BK library does carry other controversial books like Mein Kampf, physically and digitally.

All of this to say that while politics is always going to influence curatorial choices of “merit”, I think suggesting that the Brooklyn library “banned” The Turner Diaries merely due to its absence from the catalog is a bit of a stretched conclusion.

It would be better to have a suite of controversial books and check those - I agree. That wouldn't really be a "litmus test" though - that would be more of a "test suite" which is a bit more effort than I care to invest in the claims of random groups that they oppose book banning. A litmus test, by definition, has a singular pass/fail check.

Regarding the popularity of The Turner Diaries - I believe I already addressed this. It has similar search volume, per Google Trends, as one of the example books from the article - "The Black Flamingo" - despite being published ~50 years earlier. So, I don't think popularity is a determining factor in what books the BPL is making available.

Furthermore, effectively banned books, by definition, cannot be popular. If they were popular then the bans on them would not be effective.

I feel that I've let my desire to engage in "point by point" internet-style arguments derail me though. Why the BPL does not have The Turner Diaries is beside my point - maybe they don't like it ideologically, maybe it's just not popular enough, maybe they've never heard of it - who knows.

Instead, the point I want to be making is more like - "If you think book banning is bad, would you want to make this book that advocates for genociding non-white people available to kids?" Because you should test your principles at the limits and not on appealing special cases.

A lefty 2SLQBTGIA+ activist may think and say that "Book banning is bad" when they look at a list of 1,500 books about gay sexuality being banned - but that doesn't mean they are actually against book banning, they might just be against things they like being banned. If you want to know if that lefty person is against book banning, find a book that they would hate and ask them how they feel about that. Similarly, if this article were published by a neo-Nazi institute of religious fundamentalism, I wouldn't be asking them "How about the Turner Diaries?" They would absolutely host that book and complain about it being banned. I'd ask them "How about the 1619 Project?"

As I wrote in my original comment, I am actually for book banning. I think some books are inappropriate for young people and those books should be banned from contexts where young people are likely to encounter them. When someone comes along and says "I'm against book banning!" I feel the need to challenge that because I think book banning is fine and good.

> Similarly, if this article were published by a neo-Nazi institute of religious fundamentalism, I wouldn't be asking them "How about the Turner Diaries?" They would absolutely host that book and complain about it being banned. I'd ask them "How about the 1619 Project?"

A complication that the 1619 Project brings up is that there are different actions which might reasonably fall under the heading of "banning". For example, repeated problems corroborating particular narratives in Elie Wiesel's Night led that book to be stocked in bookstores, but shelved under "fiction". Until someone started raising complaints in the media, at which point there was just as little corroboration but stores started shelving the book under "nonfiction" anyway.

> Elie Wiesel's Night

I read that during my junior year in high school. It was the last straw that launched me into a depressive episode that wrecked my grades for the year that mattered most on college applications and I barely missed having to repeat the year.

It's probably not the fault of the book that it was dangerous to me, and if not Night, something else probably would have done it. I don't think censorship is a solution, but there is definitely room for educators to be aware of the psychological safety issues presented by traumatic material.

I remember reading the first chapter and just writing the shortest possible essay i could based on that chapter reading and some janky synopsis I found online. Just couldn’t read that one at 16. I did read Man’s search for meaning (Viktor Frankl) in my late twenties and enjoyed it so maybe I should go back and give night another try now that I feel less depressed.

I almost was convinced by this point, but I guess we can find Mein Kampf in library

Maybe the most reasonable interpretation of people's professed desire to not ban books places them into two categories: books that inspire acts of terrorism or are otherwise tantamount to inciting, and books which introduce political or personal concepts which a small number of people object to. Eliding the difference between the two seems a little absurd, if I may say so.

But is it a book with literary value? There’s a lot of books in the world, why do you feel this one is essential for a library to stock?

"Literary value" is a hard thing to define. It's a famous book that has inspired (negative) real world events. It has comparable Google search traffic to "The Black Flamingo", one of the books listed in the article as being available, despite being written in 1978. It captures the thinking of an under represented group of people - by which I mean white supremacists, not the kind of "white supremacists" who think affirmative action is bad, but the kind who literally explicitly want to exterminate non-white people.

>"Literary value" is a hard thing to define.

Which is why it should be decided by the people who run the libraries and not politicians. That is the difference between banning a book and a library choosing not to buy a book. Is the Turner Diaries banned or have libraries simply decided not to buy a copy?

Couldn't much the same thing be said about Florida schools "banning" books with so-called "critical race theory" and/or LGBTQ themes?

Students aren't going to get expelled for reading these books. Their parents aren't going to be criminally charged for buying them for their kids to take to school and read. Everyone in Florida is welcome to buy as many copies of these "banned" books as they want. The schools in Florida have just chosen not to buy some books they feel didn't have educational value. So what's all the fuss about?

>The schools in Florida have just chosen not to buy some books they feel didn't have educational value. So what's all the fuss about?

The fuss is about the state deciding what Florida schools can and cannot do. Yes, I think the same concepts apply in Florida, but you are misstating what is happening there. The political wings of the government are making these decisions. I want the experts to make these decisions, the people on the ground running these libraries. The needs of a majority Hispanic school in Miami are going to be different than the needs of a rural majority white school outside of Lake City. Don't take tools out of the hands of the people running those libraries. Let them make the decisions instead of some politician trying to score points. The irony of this coming from the "small government" party shows that this is not a principled stand. It is motivated purely by politics and I don't like that.

>The fuss is about the state deciding what Florida schools can and cannot do.

The state decides what Florida schools do because the state runs Florida schools. My employer tells me to do things all the time.

I’d say my main concern isn’t strictly “banning books” but open access to information.

How do you determine literary value? The catcher in the rye at least was considered risqué and had been banned. It isn’t some great novel unlike any other — it’s about a teenager complaining. Even still why ban it? Let people read.

It seems to have had a big cultural impact.

Because it's controversial.

so where is a good example of that litmus test being passed, where self published books are also routinely hosted?

I think Library Genesis is an excellent example. As a quick test they host both The Turner Diaries and The 1619 Project.

https://libgen.li/

I would believe the people who run libgen if they said they were against book banning - at least until I discovered the books that they did ban, if there are any.

Probably a better test for Library Genesis would be books that are notorious in Russia (whatever those might be, I don't know.) I doubt the Turner Diaries has much notoriety in Russia, due to the language barrier if nothing else.

Indeed. If it's supported (tacitly or explicitly) by the Russian government, I would expect them to have books that polarize Americans.

Okay, but what russian books are banned on libgen? Because otherwise this is just such a weird conspiracy. The russian government is funding niche fringe books on a niche website to divide Americans? But also not censoring anything that would hurt their own cabale?

My point was more "of the books that would be banned, these are not the right type of books." I don't speak Russian, but I would doubt they have anti-Putin books in Russian or in English. That seems bad for the curators health.

Libgen absolutely does have anti-Putin books in English. But I don't know about Russian.

For instance, I found:

Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror by Alexander Litvinenko (the guy Putin murdered with Polonium)

Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped by Garry Kasparov

Freezing Order : A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

Putin's labyrinth: spies, murder, and the dark heart of the new Russia by Steve Levine

Mr. Putin by Fiona Hill

Those are strong arguments that Libgen doesn't censor their curation.

That's interesting, my observation is that you keep using caricatures of US political polarization, where one has to imagine that the left imagines that The Turner Diaries is a good example of something to ban and one has to imagine that the right imagines that The 1619 Project is something to ban.

This might be playing out reliably, in places that ban books. So way to go Library Genesis for passing the test.

It just seems like US caricatures of beliefs that don't actually represent people's beliefs, while being limited to US stuff, is just not the best test.

I'm using The Turner Diaries because I know it is an extreme example. Rather than search for the most benign conservative/right wing/whatever kind of book that is banned, which would be hard, I just take a single known extreme example. I'm using The 1619 Project as an example because it was given in the article - not unfairly, I do think there are people who want to ban that book.

And your qualifications to make this call as opposed to a professional like a librarian are?

It is obviously not an "expert" issue, but a values issue, which anyone is able to argue.

In fact, this common equivocation of "expert knowledge" with "value judgments" is a scourge on our modern discourse.

> And your qualifications to make this call as opposed to a professional like a librarian are?

This is a... stunningly helpless and pathetic appeal to authority. Librarians are professionals in the field of locating information within a collection. They are not professionals in the field of what books people should or shouldn't read. That is a moral question; the relevant professional would be a priest or similar.

Numerous libraries will take recommendations for book purchases.

Acting on those tends to scale with the reputation of author and/or publisher, but there are reasonably good odds.

I think this choice of litmus test say a great deal about you, and basically nothing about the phenomenon of banned books.

If it says a "great deal" then surely you could elaborate beyond a single vague sentence.

What's so bad about it? If someone says they are against banning books, asking "what do you mean by that?" may not get you an honest response due to the claimant not necessarily considering their position thoroughly. Checking for the Turner Diaries seems like a good quick and dirty test to see what they really mean.

The books being banned are more of antiracist.

Maybe if the usual measure of freedom of speech did not consistently priviledged white supremacist books, as if those were more important then their oposition, the state of affairs would not be as it is.