Speaking of OIF, if you’re going to be in Chicago on Saturday, September 29, 2007, here’s where you should be between 1 and 4 p.m.:

As part of the 26th annual celebration of Banned Books Week, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, and the Newberry Library are holding a Banned Books Week Read-Out! in Pioneer Plaza–at Michigan Ave. and the Chicago River–on Saturday, September 29, 2007, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.  Local Chicago celebrities are joining several acclaimed authors to read passages from their favorite banned and “challenged” books.  Admission is free!

For more information about Banned Books Week, just visit your local library and ask for a copy of And Tango Makes Three. I mean, follow this link. For more information about the Read-Out! click here.

There are a lot of great things about working for Booklist. One of them is that I work down the hall from the Office for Intellectual Freedom. How cool is that? Not to rub it in, but I’ll bet you don’t have an Office for Intellectual Freedom at your workplace.

They have lots of good advice. For instance:

Q: Do I need to remove the book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World from my library?

A: No.

For a less glib but more useful explanation, visit their blog:

Alms for Jihad is the subject of a British libel lawsuit brought by Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz, who has filed several similar lawsuits to contest claims that the Saudi government has used Islamic charities to fund terrorism. Cambridge University Press chose to settle the suit rather than risk a large damage award at trial. Under the settlement, Cambridge University Press has agreed to pulp unsold copies and to ask libraries to return the book to the publisher or destroy the book.

But some of them are, and some of them work in publishing. From The Independent (”Author’s nude drawings too hot for US publisher,” by Tony Paterson):

One of Germany’s best-selling children’s authors is embroiled in an extraordinary transatlantic row about nudity after a US publisher refused to accept one of her books because it contained naive sketches of an art gallery with works depicting naked bodies.

The Comics Reporter (”American Publisher Passes on German Kids’ Book and Its Cartoon Nudity“) reproduces one of the offending images. (Thanks, Bookslut!)

As the father of two young boys, I can report that young boys are extremely interested in penises. We can tell them that penises do not, in fact, exist, but they do have the means of proving us wrong.

Over at Soft Skull Press, Richard Eoin Nash offers some context on the politics of Tintin, in the form of an excerpt from the book, Tintin and the Secret of Literature. (It was first published in the UK by Granta; Soft Skull will offer the U.S. edition.) When the book was  written, Tintin in the Congo had apparently not yet been translated to English. It looks like a very interesting book. The excerpt acknowledges Tintin’s right-wing origins but then cites a swing to the left:

But almost as soon as this right-wing tendency gets going it becomes shadowed by a left-wing counter-tendency. In Tintin in America, which he published in book form in 1932, Herge bitingly satirises capitalist mass-production and American racism (the English translation has been softened: what the small-town bank clerk really tells the police who turn up after a heist is: ‘We immediately lynched seven Negroes’ - not ‘hoboes’ - ‘but the culprit got away.’). In The Blue Lotus Tintin snaps the cane with which an American oil magnate has been beating a Chinese rickshaw driver, exclaiming ‘Brute! Your conduct is disgraceful, Sir!’

In my memory, the visual racial stereotypes continued unabated — but, of course, those were different times.

That does it. I’m going to dig up my old box of Tintins and read them with a gimlet eye.

From the Tintin desk: Borders stores in the U.S. will also move Tintin in the Congo to the graphic novels section. From Publishers Weekly (”Borders Shelves Kids’ Tintin Title in Adult Section, by Karen Holt”):

Borders in the U.S. released a statement about the book after PW raised the issue  last week. Spokesperson Ann Binkley said the retailer carries some titles from the Tintin series in its children’s sections. She added that the Borders is, “committed to acting responsibly as a retailer and with sensitivity to all of the communities we serve.  Therefore, with respect to the specific title Tintin in the Congo, which could be considered offensive by some of our customers, we have decided to place this title in a section of our store intended primarily for adults - the Graphic Novels section. We believe adults have the capacity to evaluate this work within historical context and make their own decision whether to read it or not.  Other "Tintin" titles will remain in the children’s section.” 

Meanwhile Washington DC’s Politics & Prose bookstore says they decided a couple of years ago not to carry it at all:

Meanwhile Dara La Porte, manager of the children’s department of Politics & Prose in Washington DC, decided after seeing a U.K.-published edition of the book  in 2005 not to sell it because of the racist content. “We got it in back a year and a half ago and returned it. We don’t carry it. If Little, Brown has changed it in some way we might consider carrying it,” she said. 

It’s hard to fault an individual bookseller for following her conscience. But the suggestion that the book should be rewritten for modern tastes raises a thorny point: does altering an offensive book to make it palatable to modern sensibilities represent progress? Or is it creepy and Orwellian? Even when the book itself is creepy, I’d have to vote for the latter. We should respond to the books as they were written, not make them respond to us.

On AL Focus, Beverly Goldberg talks to Susan Patron about the scrotum flap brouhaha:

Susan Patron’s book “The Higher Power of Lucky” became known for two things in the past year: winning the 2007 ALA Newberry Medal, and being at the center of an uproar when some school librarians removed the book because it contained the word “scrotum.” In this interview, conducted at the 2007 ALA Annual Conference, AL’s Beverly Goldberg speaks with Patron about that controversial word, connecting with young readers, and what she’s working on next.

In London, a customer’s outrage has caused Borders to pull Tintin in the Congo from the children’s section of its UK stores. (That the customer was a human-rights lawyer is probably incidental.) From the Associated Press (”Borders stores in UK shelve Tintin book,” by Raphael G. Satter):

David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.

“The material suggests to (children) that Africans are subhuman, that they are imbeciles, that they’re half savage,” Enright said in a telephone interview.

“My black wife, who actually comes from Africa originally, is sitting there with my boys and I’m about to hand this book to them…. What message am I sending to them? That my wife is a monkey, that they are monkeys?

The book will now be sold in the graphic-novel section. Enright would prefer that it not be sold at all, but instead displayed in a museum under the heading “old fashioned, racist claptrap.”

I haven’t read the Tintin in question, but I do have a big stack of them from when I was a kid. And even the non-Congo books are full of racist stereotypes, the least of which is that the bad guy always seems to be swarthy. Now that I’m a father, I’ve wondered from time to time how or if I should present them to my kids. Do I hand them over with a disclaimer (”enjoy the adventures, but be advised that this is chock-full of harmful racist stereotypes”) or do I just keep them in their box, figuring that there are plenty of good books that don’t need disclaimers — and the less attention we pay to them the sooner they’ll leave the cultural imagination?

But then of course there’s the Peter Jackson movie, so I guess we can probably look forward to Tintin Happy Meals. Although Tintin may have a multicultural team of helpers by then, too.

It’s tough to argue against book censorship when an offensive book is the test case. But it seems that an appropriate solution has been reached here: sell it to people who are old enough to understand the issues. (This is different from taking, for example, gay-themed books out of the kids’ section.) Pulling books from the shelves entirely has always been a very dangerous act.