[sfink]

You may be overthinking this. "Banned" in this case means that the usual person or people who choose what books to include are being overridden by a party with more clout. From the perspective of a school librarian, for example, book X has been banned. They no longer have the option of including it. (This is even true in the case where the librarian would not have included it anyway, for their own reasons.) They are prevented by the school board, an angry mob of parents, the state legislature, the FBI, or whoever. The fact that the public library down the road carries the book does not change whether that librarian has the option of including it in their school library's collection. They can't. They are banned from including it.

[steviedotboston]

The FBI is not telling school librarians to not stock copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. I really don't see the issue with local entities like a school board having some say in material that is available in a school. That can differ across the country, and thats fine. That's what our country is supposed to be like.

But a library acting like they are doing some brave act of resistance by putting out a stack of books that are widely available, have always been widely available, and will always be, and saying they are "banned books, this is banned books week, look at all the books that have been banned!" when really they are books that a school board in wisconsin said shouldn't be in an elementary school library because the sex scenes are not appropriate for 7 year olds seems really silly to me.

[sfink]

If it were the FBI, it wouldn't be "To Kill a Mockingbird", it would be "Amateur Forgery, volume XVII: Passports" or something. Well, or something similar that wasn't already illegal.

> I really don't see the issue with local entities like a school board having some say in material that is available in a school.

Then you prefer a low-trust environment. I prefer a high-trust environment. A librarian shouldn't be putting 50 Shades of Grey on a grade school shelf to begin with. If they are, then you should be replacing the librarian, not micromanaging them. Book selection is their job. Let them do their job or don't; don't allow them the authority to only do half their job.

> But a library acting like they are doing some brave act of resistance by putting out a stack of books that are widely available...and saying they are "banned books, this is banned books week, look at all the books that have been banned!" when really they are books that a school board in wisconsin said shouldn't be in an elementary school library because the sex scenes are not appropriate for 7 year olds seems really silly to me.

Again, that's a "replace or reprimand the librarian" problem. It's not meant to be a brave act of resistance, it's information to say "these books have been banned, look at them so you can better understand what books people want to ban and why". And obviously, it's more interesting than "these are books where the 3rd letter in the title is T" and so it garners more attention, but it's no more than that. If they're including one that was banned for dumb reasons as in your example, then that makes it a dumb display (and an inappropriate one if the display is also in a library for 7 year olds.)

Obviously, the OP is not the librarian, and is aiming for an act of resistance, so my argument mostly doesn't apply there. Though the part about choices having the potential of being dumb still does. The set of books that have been banned somewhere or other is quite large, it's not like it would have any meaning to have a display of all or even a random selection of them. That's a strawman. You're going to curate based on some metric.

[havblue]

I believe that the party with the most clout is the one that controls the frame. So yes, some parents may keep Slaughterhouse Five out of libraries. Meanwhile those same parents become strawmanned villains in mainstream movies like Footloose. So I don't think pulling a book is that effective when it winds up on a "you can't read this" list.