I’ve mentioned it before, but one of my many hats involves me working at a library, day in and day out for almost ten years now, much of it during weekends and evenings. It’s a small-town library, patronized half by unusual mountainfolk and half by new, young, well-off families moving into the areas where all of the trees were just chopped down from the backyards of the increasingly irate mountainfolk. I envision some kind of all-out battle to the death between the two diverse factions, Pelennor Fields style, and when the last crazy mountain hermit is slain, I pick through the wreckage for wallets and necklaces made from skulls of the local ‘varmints’, and leave town forever. At the end of it all, I hope to have enough of my soul left to regrow it in full, like those Magic Grow Crystals or Brainiac 13.

On the childrens’ floor of this library, there’s a glass display case near the entrance that’s often filled with books relevant to the season or a library event. It was recently suggested that I put my vast action figure collection to use in said display case… but what figures did I have that were related to literature?

As it turns out, just about all of them.

At the moment, the library system buzz is all about bringing young adults into libraries. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but one excellent way to lure these kids into libraries is the graphic novel, which are only now being lent legitimacy by the American Library Association as ‘the next big thing’. I like to think that I was way, way ahead of my time and the rest of the world is just catching up to my love of Mr. Mxyzptlk.

It’s easy to forget that Batman is actually a literary character. Sure, he’s usually accompanied by pictures and movies with sculpted rubber suit-nipples, but before anything else, he was written. The same goes for every legitimate superhero, and with these things earning literary credibility (with much help from Neil Gaiman’s multi-award winning adult-themed Sandman series), it was now okay to talk about ‘comic books’ in libraries. I don’t have to say that I ‘collect action figures’ anymore. I can say that I ‘collect articulated scale replicas of supernatural literary characters’. And then I could get punched in the face.

It wasn’t without hesitation that I started loaning out my action figures to the display, all perfectly preserved and complete in tupperware drawers and arranged on shelves. I’m the kind of person who likes to have everything at arm’s length… just in case. Just in case the nearby dam springs a Gollum-shaped hole and I need to plug it. You know. After the display got a lock on it, I carted in my Lord of the Rings collection (yes, also literary characters, believe it or not!) and left it in the hands of our childrens’ librarian.

Sure, she put an orc on a horse instead of a Warg, and prologue Bilbo doesn’t really belong near the other Hobbits, but it looks great. Treebeard clutches a Hobbit in his mighty hand, a slain warrior lies at the feet of Sauron. Some of the local kids set up the bottom shelf, which gave me a momentary palpitation when I learned of it, but everything checks out just fine, and toys are for kids anyhow, right?

I wasn’t so much a curator as a guy who happened to have a lot of related crap lying around. When I first unleashed these guys from their blister cards many years ago, I was hanging out in the dorms with my girlfriend and her roommate, and we all took part opening and examining the figures, so it was in this spirit of sharing that I loaned out my collection. When I lived in the dorms, I left a lot of my figures out and my roommate Brian would set them up in amusing poses when I was out of the room, which was always hilarious to come back to. Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus learned a lot about each other in those days…. but it’s never about having something, it’s about sharing.

Plus, what’s cooler than spending an afternoon with two cute girls and a dozen Lord of the Rings figures? The best of both worlds.

Although this years’ celebration is nearly over, the American Library Association has been recognizing Banned Books Week for a quarter-century as of 2006. During this week, starting last Saturday, the ALA has announced numerous books that have recently been censored, as well as long-opposed classics such as Slaughterhouse Five and 1984; Mein Kampf and The Diary of Anne Frank; Lolita and Huckleberry Finn. I’ll not be political here — my focus is entirely on collecting. Without getting too emotional about it, one might remember that the ever-iconic book-burning pyres have made banned books (past and present) a rare commodity.

In regards to the books listed above and the quite-common paperbacks to the right, most collectors would readily snatch up an early edition of Mark Twain or Mein Kampf without thinking twice about the morally questionable content inside. The books that have generated the most discussion and the highest sales fit into the regular categories of demand and rarity, and no doubt the censorship helped the demand for the likes of Lolita and Tropic of Cancer. The major list of historically banned books are valuable in their own right. Overlooked by collectors are the numerous books that slipped under the radar due to the ingenuity of writers and publishers.

By today’s standards, many of these lesser-known “obscene” books are quite tame. Discussing sex in anything but scientific terms or suggesting the overthrow of a goverment was enough to catch the eye of a vice squad or postal inspector and earn a writer or publisher jail time. In order to prevent discovery, authors and publishers took action:

• Aliases: Long a way for authors to feel free to express their thoughts without restraint, aliases are quite common on subversive texts; many simply went by initials (which, again, were probably made up). Because authors went to such great lengths to cover their tracks, many aliases have not been connected to an actual author and their works remain credited to their alias.
• Dedicated Publisher: It is no accident that a number of subversive works all seem to come from the same publisher. Publishers like Panurge Press, Olympia Press, and Vixen Press specialized in offensive works, while other publishers like “Anthropological Press” and “Rarity Press” appear to be either imaginary companies or were created for the limited purpose of publishing a few rare censored books. The limited number of publishers can make searches easier, but rarer editions from otherwise unknown presses can throw off the trail for a collector as it did for those interested in punishing the publisher for obscenity.
• “Privately Printed”: A hallmark of a potentially-censored work. Laws like the Comstock Act focused on distribution and sale of obscene works, so publishers opted to indicate that the book was not intended to be sold to the public. Panurge Press indicates their books are “intended for private circulation among adult collectors of literary curiosities,” while Fallstaff Press says their books was printed for “exclusive subscription of adult students of anthropology.” Subscriptions, “educational purposes”, and numbered editions all indicate an interest in protecting an author or publisher from prosecution.
• Rebinding and Renaming: To slip by the customs official or vice inspector, forbidden books somtimes appeared with less-eyecatching names and possibly bound differently than the regular edition, particularly translations. Parisian bookbinders often re-bound illicit texts to make them less conspicuous, even renaming such books as the Kama Sutra and Henry Miller’s Tropics to avoid sharp-eyed censors. An unfamiliar title or uninteresting cover may be hiding an early or rare edition of an otherwise banned book. Similar to how run-of-the-mill dimestore novels tried to play up their content with lurid covers and innuendo-laden titles, books that might run afoul of censorship did the opposite by playing down the content with simple covers and ambiguous titles.

As you might surmise, all of the above add up to a deliberately rare and obscure group of books. The main printings may be rare, in the hundreds of copies for “private collectors,” re-bound books may even be one-of-a-kind. In many cases, these illicit printings are the only accessible way to acquire a number of Greek, Roman, or French translations of works that the general publishing community shyed away from due to content. Also, relatively common newer printings of censored books appeared earlier in extremely limited quanities directed at private collectors by these obscure presses, making them quite rare.

For lovers of the art of bookbinding, many of these books were printed with quality in mind. Panurge Press, in particular, made their books look like the limited collector’s edition they claimed to be, with quality color frontispieces, textured bindings, uncut pages, and artistic typesetting. Paperbacks, like the non-censored peers of the time, did not survive well, although re-bound paperbacks have preserved copies that would otherwise have disintegrated due to time.

While publishers and authors have less to fear due to liberal interpretation of obscenity laws today (and in no small part to the attention on obscene photos, videos, and websites), this leniency is a relatively recent experience. Publishers prior to the 1950s used their wits to get their books published, regardless of moral opposition to their books’ contents. Even if your personal beliefs do not agree with a book’s topic, collectors can agree that these books still hold a value beyond their “banned” labelling.