In the bad books

From Art Spiegelman to Margaret Atwood, books are disappearing from American schools’ shelves. What’s behind the rise in censorship?

- Claire Armitstead

WHEN THE OWNERS OF A TENNESSEE COMICS SHOP learned that a local school board had voted to remove Art Spiegelman ’s Holocaust classic Maus from its curriculum, they sprang into action with an appeal calling for donations to fund free copies for schoolchildren. Within hours, money started pouring in from all over the world. “We had donations from Israel, the UK and Canada as well as from the US,” says Richard Davis, coowner of Nirvana Comics.

Ten days later, they closed the appeal, after raising $110,000 from 3,500 donors. “We bought up all the copies the publisher had in its warehouse and we’re now in the process of shipping 3,000 copies of Maus to students all over the country, along with a study guide written by a local schoolteacher,” says Davis.

For Spiegelman, it has meant an exponential sales boost for a 30-year-old book – the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize, in 1992 – and a flurry of speaking engagements across the country. “It just shows,” he says, “you can’t ban books unless you’re willing to burn them and you can’t burn them all unless you’re willing to burn the writers and the readers too.”

That’s just as well, adds the 74 -year-old cartoonist, “because this is the most Orwellian version of society I’ve ever lived in. It’s not as simple as left v right. It’s a culture war that’s totally out of control. As a first-amendment fundamentalist, I believe in the right of anyone to read anything, provided they are properly supported. If a kid wants to read Mein Kampf, it’s better to do it in a library or school environment than to discover it on Daddy’s shelves and be traumatised.”