The Absolutely True Story of the Unbanned Banned Books List

(course journal entry assignment, December 2016; UPDATED August 24, 2022)

My most memorable experience with book challenges wasn’t about helping with titles that had been targeted, but rather, helping with titles that had never been targeted.

(tl;dr version: Darn internet!)

Several years ago it had come to my attention that the Library of the American Library Association (ALA) was getting banned/challenged queries from students about titles that were not only not included in the ALA’s triannually published Banned Books Resource Guides compilations, edited by Robert Doyle, listing decades of book challenges — whose most recent edition was the 2014 Banned Books: Challenging Our Freedom to Read; it’s supplemented in the intervening years by annual PDF brochures published on the Illinois Library Association website, of which Doyle is executive director — or the confidential database of challenges that were never made public which is maintained by ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) staff only, but were also, in checking other known sources, never challenged or banned by anyone. Asking students how those titles came to their attention as being challenged or banned books brought derivations of the same answer, “I saw it on the internet.” Oh, great. That’s specific.

We were aware of a previous website viewer comprehension error years before, in which a famous list of books at the time had been duplicated on the OIF section of the…