Monday, April 09, 2012

The Censor's Library by Nicole Moore

Reposted from BoingBoing - March 23, 2012


It is a little known fact that for most of the 20th century Australian officials have banned more books than most other English-speaking or Western countries.
Australian literary historian Nicole Moore has written a book about the history of Australia's censorship of books between the 1920's and 1980's after discovering a hidden archive of banned books\in a government repository. nearly 800 boxes of books were stored discovered and provided Moore with the materials to write her new book The Censor's Library, about the history of Australian's literary censorship.

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

As Moore shows, such secret collections have accumulated in many parts of the world, often carefully tended by censor-librarians. Private Case, Public Scandal, the book that revealed the contents of the British Library's secret collection, was itself banned in Australia in 1966. Not surprisingly, the 20th century's largest and most notorious repository of forbidden literature was in the Soviet Union, with more than 1 million items.

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