The Censor Keeps a Copy

Twenty years ago, give or take, a friend told me a story he expected me to admire. He was a Latter-day Saint who worked in technology, and he was, as I understood it then, the bishop of his ward, an unpaid office the church gives to laymen who keep their day jobs, so he kept a company’s hours all week and presided over a congregation on Sundays. There was a Mormon bookstore he went into often, and one day he walked in and found a new display for Goosebumps, the paperbacks with the dripping green logo about haunted masks, a ventriloquist’s dummy with a mind of its own, and a werewolf in a Florida swamp. He spoke to the owner. The owner told him the books were selling well and that those sales were keeping the store alive. My friend pressed him on content, judged the whole series blasphemous, an invitation to the occult at a child’s price, and let it be understood that if the titles stayed on the shelf a report would go to the stake president. A week later he came back. The books were gone, the owner was distant and cold, and my friend bought a couple of books, in his own phrase, to make up the difference. He told me this the way another man might tell you he had coached his kid’s team to a championship. He was proud. The word I have settled on, twenty years later, is forensic: he had investigated, prosecuted, and won, and he walked out of that store on the high of it.

I was an author and a publisher then, as I am now, and I was sad, and I was offended, and I remember being surprised by the size of both feelings. He had done nothing to the books. R.L. Stine had sold well past a hundred million copies by then and would keep selling them without any help from that store. What my friend had done was reach into the lives of every family who shopped there and remove an option they had never asked him to weigh for them. He had also reached into a merchant’s ledger, on the merchant’s own testimony, and cut the line that was paying the rent. The children of that congregation came out of it with a new errand: find the haunted mask somewhere else, which they would, and learn in the finding that the forbidden thing is the interesting thing. Our friendship ended over it, slowly and then completely, and I have turned the story over for two decades because I have come to believe he was describing a pleasure. That pleasure is the subject of this article.

The feeling has a pedigree older than any church. Plato had it. In the Republic, Socrates proposes that the guardians of the ideal city be raised on stories purged of quarreling gods, of a frightening underworld, of heroes weeping over their dead. Homer would be edited. Hesiod would be edited. A poet who declined the edit would be crowned with wool, anointed with myrrh, praised as a holy and wonderful creature, and walked to the border. What makes the passage worth rereading twenty-four centuries later is the cheerfulness. Socrates lays out the whole scheme like a man planning a garden. He is designing a nursery in which no child will ever meet a ghost, and he is certain the nursery is a gift.

Florence learned what the nursery costs. On the seventh of February, 1497, the friar Girolamo Savonarola sent bands of boys through the streets to collect the vanities of the city, and the city handed them over: mirrors, cosmetics, playing cards, dice, wigs, secular songbooks, manuscripts of Ovid and Boccaccio, paintings of women who were not the Madonna. The pile in the Piazza della Signoria rose higher than a house and burned all afternoon while the boys sang. The boys are the point. Savonarola put children in charge of taking things from their own parents, taught them the taking was holy, and the children discovered what every censor’s foot soldier discovers, that there is a thrill in being the one who is allowed to seize. Fifteen months later the city hanged and burned Savonarola in the same square. The mirrors came back. The thrill had already been taught.

Rome made the pleasure permanent. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic list of forbidden books, began in 1559 under Paul IV and ran until 1966, four centuries of a committee in an office deciding what the faithful of the whole world would be denied. Copernicus went on it, and Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Flaubert, and Zola. The list reads like the syllabus for a good education, which is the joke history plays on every index. Any list of what the pious may not read becomes, inside a generation, the list of what the curious will read first. By 1966 the Index had become an advertisement for its own contents, and the church quietly retired it.

England tried the bonfire without the fire. In September 1642 the Puritan Parliament ordered the playhouses shut, and they stayed shut for eighteen years. Five years after that the same Parliament abolished Christmas, the feast and the games and the twelve days a poor household could count on someone else’s table, and in 1659 the Massachusetts Bay colony fined anyone caught keeping the day five shillings. The takers describe what they take as nothing, so let me itemize it: the whole of Shakespeare gone from the stage for a generation, so that a man who had grown up on Lear now had no Lear, and a servant’s one holiday, and the maypole. Thomas Morton raised one at Merry Mount in 1627 and danced around it with his settlers and their Native neighbors, and William Bradford recorded the scene with disgust, as a revival of the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. Myles Standish arrested Morton and shipped him to England, and John Endecott had the pole cut down. The offense was company: people of two nations drinking together in the woods with a fiddle. The ban was written in the language of God’s honor, and the pleasure was in the cutting.

H.L. Mencken watched the descendants of those Puritans at work in Boston and defined their creed in a line that has outlived everything they banned: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. He was mocking them and he was also diagnosing them. The definition skips sin entirely and lands on the other person’s happiness, which is where the pleasure of the censor has always lived. Anthony Comstock proved it with numbers. For more than forty years he served as a special agent of the Post Office with power over the mail of the United States, and in 1913, two years before he died, he summed up the career for an interviewer. He had convicted enough people to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty of them carrying sixty passengers each and the sixty-first nearly full. A hundred and sixty tons of literature had gone to the pulp mill on his word. He counted suicides too. When the abortionist Madame Restell cut her throat in 1878 after he arrested her in her own home, he called her death the fifteenth suicide he had caused, and the count was a boast. In 1902 he pursued Ida Craddock, who wrote pamphlets of advice for the newly married, through a workhouse sentence and into a federal conviction, and on the day she was due to report to prison she killed herself and left a public letter naming him. Comstock kept a collection of everything he seized, called it his Chamber of Horrors, and carried it to Washington to show congressmen. The man who had read more obscenity than anyone in America was the man who had decided no one else could.

Heinrich Heine wrote, more than a century before it happened, that where they burn books they will in the end burn people, and Germany tested the line on the tenth of May, 1933, when students in Berlin and more than thirty other university towns hauled Heine’s own work, along with Freud, Heinrich Mann, Remarque, Kästner, and Helen Keller, onto bonfires while Goebbels made a speech. I bring the Nazis in for one reason, which is that their fire is the one everyone agrees to condemn, and it ran on the fuel of the church bookstore: the conviction that the reader is weaker than the page, that a nation or a congregation or a child must be kept from an idea because the idea will win. Only the scale differs.

America answered the German fires fifteen years later with fires of its own, and children lit them. In October 1948 in Spencer, West Virginia, a thirteen-year-old named David Mace stood before six hundred schoolmates and a pyre of two thousand comic books they had spent a month collecting door to door, recited a pledge that comics were mentally, physically, and morally injurious, and added a line no adult could have improved: we also pledge ourselves to try not to read any more. His reading teacher had recruited him. Weeks later the students of St. Patrick’s parochial school in Binghamton, New York, went house to house asking whether there were any comic books in the home, gathered two thousand, and burned them in the schoolyard, and Time magazine ran the pictures. David Hajdu counted fifteen such burnings in his history of the comic-book scare. The Charleston Daily Gazette, in the same state as the Spencer fire, printed an editorial saying the obvious, that the burning of books was too recent in the country’s memory, that the Nazis had done it and had gone on to burn the authors. Spencer was not listening. By 1954 the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham had published Seduction of the Innocent, the Senate had held its hearings, and the publishers had saved themselves with the Comics Code, which forbade the words horror and terror in any title and banished vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and the walking dead from the American newsstand. The horror comic died. Its readers grew up, and one of them, a boy from Columbus, Ohio, whose own mother had banned the comics from the house so that he read them at the barbershop, wrote Goosebumps.

The pattern repeats so faithfully you can set a watch by it. In 1985 the Parents Music Resource Center, founded by Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, asked the record industry to rate albums with letters, and one of the proposed letters was O, for occult. Frank Zappa went before the Senate Commerce Committee that September and told the senators that in law First Amendment questions are decided in favor of the least restrictive alternative, and that measured by that standard the PMRC’s demands amounted to treating dandruff by decapitation. Then he said the thing my friend never heard anyone say to him. Nobody had forced Mrs. Gore or Mrs. Baker to bring Prince into their homes. They were free to buy other records for their own children. What they wanted was a label on everyone else’s.

Then came the boy wizard. Harry Potter was the most challenged book series in America for the whole of the 2000s by the American Library Association’s count, and the objections were the Goosebumps objections with the serial numbers filed off: witchcraft, the occult, sorcery presented as fun. A church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, burned the books at the end of 2001, and a church in Pennsylvania had burned them that spring, on the theory that a British boarding school with a flying-broom sport was a recruiting office for Satan. In 2019 a Catholic school in Nashville pulled the series from its library on the pastor’s written finding that the spells in it were real spells. Goosebumps itself sat at number fifteen on the ALA’s list of the hundred most challenged books of the 1990s, for being too frightening for young readers and for its occult and demonic themes, and the most challenged book of that decade was Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a folklore collection. The line runs straight from the Republic to the strip mall. Somebody, in every century, decides that children must be kept from the dark, and the children, in every century, find the dark anyway, usually under the covers with a flashlight, and grow up fine.

The pleasure has an anatomy, and the first part of it is cheapness. A ban costs the banner almost nothing, and in my friend’s case the price is on the record: a couple of paperbacks, bought to make up the difference against a line of sales the owner had just said was keeping his store alive. There is an old name for that purchase. Conscience money is what the English called the anonymous sums that tax cheats mailed to the Exchequer to feel square, and two books against a store’s survival is conscience money at the exchange rate censors have always preferred. He wrote no book, raised no child besides his own, built no better bookstore; he had one conversation and walked out with a scalp. Every other form of moral labor asks for years. This one asks for an afternoon and rewards it with the feeling of having done something, and no feeling is more addictive.

Enlargement is the second part. A man who empties a shelf has made his private taste into public law for everyone who shops there, and a private taste that becomes law feels, from the inside, like authority. My friend brought the stake’s taste to the counter, on loan, and left his own at home. In that church a stake president sits above the bishops of several congregations and is one of the two officers who sign a member’s temple recommend, and a Mormon bookstore lives or dies on the goodwill of the stake it serves, so a hint that a report might travel upward was all the order the afternoon required. A bishop hinted, an owner who could not afford to test the hint did the arithmetic, and the shelf was cleared without a word from the church itself, and that is how most shelves get emptied: by a committee of one who borrows a larger committee’s name for an afternoon, and a merchant or a clerk who cannot afford to find out whether the borrowing is real. The third part is exemption, and the censors never mention it. To judge the book you have to read the book. Comstock inspected a hundred and sixty tons. Wertham read the comics. My friend, to know that Goosebumps was blasphemous, had to know what was in Goosebumps, which means he had read the haunted mask and the living dummy and the werewolf of Fever Swamp and had survived, and had then decided that other people’s children could not be trusted with what he had handled unharmed. Every ban is also a license, issued to one person, and the person is the banner.

Taken to its limit, the pleasure takes away people. When Jakob Ammann split the Swiss Brethren in 1693, the quarrel was over how hard to shun, and the sects that keep a shunning rule to this day order the faithful to stop speaking to a brother or a daughter who has left. That is the emptied shelf applied to the dinner table. My friend’s church asked nothing of the kind from him and I will not pretend it did. I raise it because the logic is continuous. A movement that believes it may decide what you read will, given time and a committee, believe it may decide whom you love, and the second belief feels, to the people holding it, like the first one grown up.

The genius of the argument against all of this belongs to John Milton. In 1643 Parliament had ordered that no book be printed without a license, and Milton, who had himself been reported to it for printing without one, wrote Areopagitica the next year to shame the members out of the order. His case runs deeper than the free-speech slogans it later fed. He says a man who kills a good book kills reason itself, since a book is the living extract of a mind. He says he cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, one that has never sallied out to see its adversary, because a virtue that has never met vice has never been tested and cannot be called a virtue at all. And he says the licensers will be either the ignorant, who cannot judge, or the learned, who will find the work beneath them and pass it to clerks. Every part of that has come true in every century since. The licenser of Goosebumps was one man in a bookstore. His protected virtue was a virtue that had never met a ghost. And the reason he killed was the reason of every child who might have learned, from a cheap paperback, that fear can be faced on a page and put down when the chapter ends.

Science, for whatever a censor cares about it, sides with Milton. Mathias Clasen runs the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University and wrote Why Horror Seduces, and his work on people who seek fright on purpose supports what any Goosebumps reader could have told him: the fear is a rehearsal. Children in particular use frightening stories to practice the emotion at a dose they control, with the closed book as the exit, and the practice is a kind of mastery. The Harvard folklorist Maria Tatar has made the case for the Grimms, whose tales are bloodier than anything Stine ever wrote and were told to children for centuries by people who understood, without a laboratory, that a child who has met the wolf in a story is better armed for the wolf in the woods. Take the wolf out of the story and you have taken nothing out of the woods.

Now a fair hearing for the other side, because an argument that never meets its adversary is Milton’s cloistered virtue in a different coat. The bookstore was private property. Its owner could have said no, no constitution was violated when he said yes, and none was violated by the hint that made him say it. I grant it in full; my quarrel was never with the law. A private censorship is still a censorship in its effects, and the question I put to my friend was whether it was a virtue, a question on which the law is silent. The second objection is stronger. Parents have the right to guard their own children. They do, and the right is exhausted at their own front door. Declining to buy Goosebumps for his own kids would have had my blessing. He went further and decided for every parent in that store, including the ones who had already decided the other way, and he counted their loss as his win.

A third objection says the books were junk, and asks why anyone should care about junk. Comstock started with dirty pictures and moved on to anatomy textbooks and adventure novels; every taste does that once it is armed, and in any case junk is where readers begin: Scholastic and a great many librarians credit Goosebumps with turning reluctant readers into readers, and the boys who read it are the men now buying hardcovers. The fourth objection is the one he would have made himself: the church teaches that some things must not be trifled with, and ghosts are among them. I will answer it from inside his tradition. The Bible he read has a ghost in it. In the twenty-eighth chapter of the first book of Samuel, King Saul goes by night to a woman at Endor who raises the dead prophet from the ground, and the prophet speaks, and Saul falls to the earth in terror. Latter-day Saint folklore has its own uncanny visitors, the Three Nephites, deathless men out of the Book of Mormon who turn up on lonely roads to help stranded travelers and then vanish, and the folklorist Hector Lee collected their legends into a book in 1949. The tradition that found a green paperback blasphemous has been telling its own children ghost stories since the tradition began.

This method has children of its own now, and most of them have learned to avoid the word ban. The publisher who quietly rewrites a dead author is one. In 2023 Roald Dahl’s estate and his publisher issued editions of his children’s books with hundreds of small deletions and substitutions, Augustus Gloop no longer fat, the Oompa-Loompas no longer small men, on the advice of sensitivity readers, and the outcry was loud enough that the publisher agreed to keep the originals in print beside the revisions. Thomas Bowdler did the same to Shakespeare in 1807 and got a verb named after him for his trouble. Ballantine Books did it to Ray Bradbury, of all people, issuing a high school edition of Fahrenheit 451 in 1967 with the damns and hells removed and a drunk man turned into a sick man, and from 1973 printing only the cleaned version, so that for six years the novel about burning books existed in America only in a form its author had never approved. Bradbury found out in 1979 when a friend handed him a copy. He got the original restored and wrote a coda about it that now travels with every edition. It went unremarked for so long because there was no note on the copyright page, which is the modern censor’s chief improvement on Savonarola. The friar burned in public. The publisher deletes in private and calls it an update.

Other children of the method wear badges and letterheads. The school board that removes a novel because one parent filled out a form, the library weeding that happens to weed in one direction, the payment processor that informs a storefront which titles it will no longer process, the rating that slides a book from the shelf a child can reach to the shelf a child cannot: each of these is the emptied shelf with better paperwork. PEN America has been counting removals from American school libraries by the thousand every year of this decade, and the objections on the forms are Wertham’s and Comstock’s and my friend’s, reworded for the era. The motive is Plato’s, and only the vocabulary is new: it speaks of safety and appropriateness and community standards, and I distrust every one of those words in the mouth of a person who is describing what other people may not have.

Here is the genius of the argument, and it is the part my friend could never have answered. The censor fails at his own task every time, and he fails by the mechanics of the thing he does. Boston’s Watch and Ward Society spent decades getting novels banned in Boston, and publishers learned to print the phrase on the jacket, because a ban in Boston sold books everywhere else. The Index ran for four centuries and the books on it became the canon. The Comics Code killed the horror comic and produced, a generation later, the most successful children’s horror series in the history of the trade, written by a boy who had read the comics before the Code took them away. Harry Potter survived every bonfire and sold more than half a billion copies. Goosebumps, with my friend’s help, passed four hundred million. Every emptied shelf is a signpost that says the good stuff is over there. The censor has reduced the supply of a thing in one place while raising the demand for it in every other, and the children of his own congregation learn from him which books are the ones worth finding.

And then the friendship. I have to answer for that, because a hostile reader will point out that I ended a friendship over books and will ask whether I ran a morality committee of my own. The difference is the whole argument. When my friend cleared the shelf, he took something from people who had not consented and who never knew his name. When I stopped calling him, I took something that was mine to give, my company, and I took it from two people only, myself and him, and he knew why. Mine was the second friendship the ban cost him; the first belonged to the owner, who had sold him books for years and who, on the day of the triumph, had gone distant and cold. That is the line between exit and censorship, and it is the only line that matters. You may refuse to read a book, refuse to buy one, refuse to stock one in your own store, refuse to let it into your own house, and refuse to keep company with the man who bans it; all of that is choosing for yourself. The moment you reach across the counter and choose for a stranger, you have joined Savonarola’s boys, and you are carrying a stranger’s mirror to the fire and calling the weight in your arms a virtue.

He was proud when he told me, and he would be proud now, since he believed then, and believes today, that he was serving God’s discipline; I expect he would read this article with delight and count it as one more witness to the win. I think of him when I pass a shelf with a gap in it, the kind a hand leaves when it takes a book that was not its own, and what I see in the gap is a child, eleven or twelve, standing in that store, reaching for the green spine that was there last week and finding bare board, and being told, if the child asks, that it was for his own good. The child will find the book. The child will also remember the shelf. And the man who emptied it went home pleased, which is the only part of the whole transaction that was ever about him.