You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture,

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Slide Notes

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them.

Published on Nov 29, 2015

banned books and school libraries

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

You don't have to burn
books to destroy a culture,
just get people to stop
reading them.

Photo by Harry Thomas Photography

Prior to 1440

books were copied by hand

Large monasteries had rooms called scriptoria where monks would copy manuscripts. The scribes in the scriptorium were not allowed to talk, nor were they allowed to correct mistakes in the text from which they were copying, which is why errors grew in each generation of a manuscript. Many historians believe that some copyists may have themselves been illiterate.

Photo by Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts

A bit of humor

Medieval monks were the bored data entry workers of their day, spending hours copying manuscripts in uncomfortable chairs and cold rooms. To keep themselves entertained, they often made little doodles or silly comments in the margins of manuscripts they were copying

Hey look, this is important...

Just as you might imagine, a reader might decide a chunk of text was particularly important and make a note in the margin, like so

THE FRANCIS TRIGGE LIBRARY

Grantham, England

In the Middle Ages, books were incredibly scarce, and although many wanted to share knowledge with the masses, they didn't quite trust the public. So the chained library was born,

ZUTPHEN CHAINED LIBRARY

Zutphen, Netherlands

Printing Press 1440ish

the Renaissance, the educated middle classes, who could now afford books, demanded works in their own languages. Furthermore, readers wanted a greater variety of books. Almanacs, travel books, chivalry romances, and poetry were all published at this time.

So it begins...

Photo by Paolo.Sammicheli.ipernity.com

The Catholic Church

Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Pope Paul IV ordered the first Index of Prohibited Books in 1559.

Photo by xlynx

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18th Century Europe

In the 18th century, the press in most of Europe was frequently subject to strict censorship.

Photo by ellenm1

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Russia

In 1922 the Russian central censorship office was established, known for short as Glavlit. Its role was to purge the Soviet society of all expressions regarded as destructive to the new order and contagious to the minds of people.

Photo by Peter Curbishley

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Nazi Germany

"From these ashes will rise the phoenix of the new spirit", Goebbels optimistically declared as the flames devoured massive funeral pyres of some 20,000 volumes of offensive books in Germany in 1933.

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Nazi Germany

"From these ashes will rise the phoenix of the new spirit", Goebbels optimistically declared as the flames devoured massive funeral pyres of some 20,000 volumes of offensive books in Germany in 1933.

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Comic Books is the US

In the 1940s, comic book burnings were happening in the US, even as GIs were returning home from seeing the same activities in Germany. Although comics were associated primarily with juvenile readers, a full 25% of the printed materials going to military PXs in World War II were comics.

Photo by kevin dooley

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