This project examines the repercussions of physical book bans leading to trashed books. What happens when books are trashed? Where do they go? Into whose hands might they fall? Is it possible that an approach of increasing bans—rather than “challenges,” “curation,” or “quarantines”—might have the effect of wider dissemination, less institutional control, and easier access to the banned texts?

The number of books being challenged at school libraries and public libraries has been growing. In 2024, there were 821 censorship attempts targeting over 4,000 titles. The majority of these title are about queer people or people of color

72% of censorship attempts in 2024 were initiated by pressure groups and decision makers who have been swayed by them rather than individual parents with specific concerns about single books. 

Moms for Liberty is one of these pressure groups. Their version of modern American book banning is a change in language from “book banning” to “book challenging,” and then from challenging to “quarantining” or even “curation.” They don’t want books removed from the shelf, just put on a higher shelf. They want to require patrons to ask for it. To require parents to say in writing that they “opt in” so that their children can read a wider variety of books, books that may help them grapple with aspects of their lives that some adults don’t seem to want to admit exist.

As patterns around the challenged books come into view, the message is clear that these groups take issue with certain lifestyles and identities.The ALA reports, “Titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47 percent of those targeted in censorship attempts.” The pattern reveals a clash between a larger societal value of embracing people as they are vs a narrow set of family values that claim children need to be sheltered from people different than ourselves. It says to those who are different, you are wrong. You require permission to interact with.You need to be curated.

The BookLooks approach feels like Foucault’s description of Catholic confession in the History of Sexuality, the idea that sex is more easily controlled if we turn it into discourse rather than banning it. A discursive approach fetishizes saying everything out loud, zooming in on it, examining every crease and fold and turn of phrase until it ceases to be anything sexual, reflective, or personal, and instead becomes a litany of items to be checked off of a list, the chaos and rage and energy of exploring one’s emerging sexuality and identity now relegated to single lines on a google spreadsheet.

A ban, on the other hand, allows something to flourish in the dark, out of sight, as decent society looks away. While a quarantined book remains within the purview of a regulatory institution, a banned book would be released from institutional oversight. Should a banned book find itself remaindered, literally tossed into the garbage, that would be an undesirable context but one that paradoxically increases a book’s public accessibility.

In Italo Calvino’s short essay, “La Poubelle Agréée,” (“The Agreeable Trashcan,”) he ruminates on the dividing line between public and private trash, that moment during the ritual of taking out the trash, that the detritus and excesses I generate in my own home are handed over to the city to properly dispose of. It is a pact between us, and taking out the trash is a kind of a civic duty. It is “the last gesture of ceremonial upon which the private is founded.”

He says that “the gesture of throwing away is the first and indispensable condition of being, since one is what one does not throw away, then the most important physiological and mental gesture is that of separating the part of me that remains from the part I must jettison to sink away into a beyond from which there is no return.”

“Writing,” Calvino continues, “no less than throwing things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled…”

Librarians have practiced mediation before. At the turn of the 20th century, a short blurb in an Oakland, CA newspaper reports librarians removing the comics sections from newspapers, and other documents record librarians’ resistance to offering novels and “easy reading” to the general public. The Dewey Decimal System is notoriously problematic, originally classifying “homosexuality” as a disorder, and assigning other keywords like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex to categories such as Abnormal Psychology, Perversion, Derangement, Social Problem and Medical Disorders.

Moms for LIberty spawned another group, Booklooks.info, which offers a “playbook” for challenging books. They have a 7 step plan of action which culminates with voting out board members who do not respond to every challenge they bring.

The BookLooks approach applies a rating to a list of ready-made “book reports.” Each report includes a detailed list of references and quotes, each tagged with codes for various offending characteristics. The BookLooks approach is a sophomoric approach of quote mining to try to make one’s point.

Meanwhile, the ALA created United Against Book Bans in response, and they offer a rsumé for each book. The resumés offer a bigger picture, putting the book into the context of critical reviews, accolades, and the author’s identity.

But all of this–from both groups, the reports and the résumés–is freely available on the internet, so now any young person with a phone can read all the reasons why they should be able to read the book on one site, and on another site read the book’s most salacious content distilled into a list on a page that meekly says, “If you’re under 18, look away.”

The philosophical question of what it means to put something in the trash is to ask where the public and private converge and cross over, and it is to ask how our detritus defines who we are. When that something is a book, then looking at libraries whose collections of books are books literally pulled from the garbage may prove insightful.

One library with a collection pulled from the garbage is in Ankara, Turkey, the Norm Altaş İşçi Kütüphanesi (“Worker Library”), which holds a collection of more than 6,000 books collected by sanitation workers along their garbage routes since January of 2019. The library is housed in an empty building donated by the sanitation department and the municipality pays for a full-time librarian.

A second is in Bogota, Colombia, where trash collector Jose Alberto Gutierrez began building a library in his own home with books pulled from his route. Twenty-five years later, and with 25,000 books, he runs La Fuerza de las Palabras (“The Force of Words”), and his library is open to the public, regularly used by many of the children in his local neighborhood.

And the third is the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. In the 1980’s, Aaron Lansky rescued thousands of Yiddish books from the garbage, almost single handedly revitalizing the Yiddish language and culture.

One way to make the trashing of books more palatable is to think of such a library as a genizah. Genizot were places where in the Middle Ages Jews disposed of holy writings that were damaged or no longer relevant. Alberto Manguel says that the genizahs became “involuntary archives.” These genizot, as archives comprised of trashed or banned documents, shed unique light on the culture or community doing the trashing.

In the context of this America, in order for books to be truly free to the public, is it fair to say that they need to be thrown away? I am uncomfortable with this claim. But maybe we should not navigate around it but instead speed straight into it. Blow it up. Break the system by leaning into it so hard it falls apart.

Grounded upon these three libraries and the Cairo Genizah, we need to think through the repercussions of physical book curation rather than bans leading to trashed books. What happens when books are trashed? Where do they go? Into whose hands might they fall? Is it possible that a radical approach of increasing bans—rather than “quarantines”—might have the effect of less control, wider dissemination, and easier access to the banned texts?

This seems to be what Moms for Liberty are trying to do with library boards. How do we counter this? How do we counter it without breaking libraries? Perhaps we can apply this approach to the Moms for LIberty and BookLooks groups. They ask concerned parents to submit books to be read. Let’s submit some books. 

ALA’s top 10 most challenged books in 2024: 1. All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson 2. Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe 3. (TIE) The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison 3. (TIE) The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky 5. Tricks, by Ellen Hopkins 6. (TIE) Looking for Alaska, by John Green 6. (TIE) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, by Jesse Andrews 8. (TIE) Crank, by Ellen Hopkins 8. (TIE) Sold, by Patricia McCormick 10. Flamer, by Mike Curato