A friend recently told me about a man who spent Banned Books Week sleeping in the window of the Kurt Vonnegut Library in Indianapolis to raise awareness for censorship issues. Corey Michael Dalton, who writes for the children's magazine Jack & Jill, spent the week behind a wall constructed of various banned books. Dalton, who blogged about his experience, had bedtime stories read to him by various local authors. This article suggests that, as a child, Dalton was personally affected by book censorship and is particularly passionate about this issue as a result.
A press release from the library suggests that the main motivation behind this was the treatment of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five by a local school district. The press release states that although the book may be checked out, a parental request is needed and the book has been relegated to a non-visible portion of the library.
This reminded me of the article by Christine Jenkins that we read for today, "Book Challenges, Challenging Books, and Young Readers" in which she talks about different ways of censoring materials. The "sentence" for a challenged book can range, and "Often challengers argue for a solution that seems, on the surface, to be a reasonable compromise. A book could be moved to closed shelving (in these cases a signed note from a parent or teacher would be required [...]"(447). As Jenkins points out, the advantage is that the book stays in the library, but the real outcome is that readers will no longer be able to locate it. In this sense, it not only makes the book difficult to find, but deters potential readers by creating a an extra process/barrier to retrieve the book.
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