Fight the Shadow Ban; Save the Books

Reflections on a rescue mission and the fate of Culture

Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts — Now rescued from oblivion.

I did a good deed this week. I normally wouldn’t so nakedly brag about such a thing in public, but I busted my hump on this one, so I need to tell you about it.

The library at the college I work for is undergoing a massive renovation project beginning this summer. This has been an accelerant tossed onto an existing fire; our library, like all libraries has long been engaged in a process of “weeding,” its collections.

I’ve always found that metaphor, which is commonly used in this type of situation, to be curious. In gardening, weeding is a task that is necessary to allow for the healthy growth of other, more desirable plants. When we “weed” books from a library, exactly what are we making a healthier soil for? Odds are, not newer, better books. Not more of “the best that’s been thought or said,” as my beloved Matthew Arnold would put it.

I went to Kent State University for my undergraduate degree. The library there was immense — 12 floors, supposedly the tallest building in Portage County, Ohio, I was told. I visited the campus several years ago and went back in the library. I found it hollowed out. The books were shipped out and now the building is a massive space for socializing, studying, and tutoring. I’m not naïve; I understand that this is a natural outcome of advancing technology. Still the whole thing makes me a little sad, as so much of the “self” that I am today was formed from nosing around those old books, discovering unexpected treasures around every corner.

My experience with that library is one of pure, uncut irony, by the way.

I was so entranced by the deep, endless stacks of books in that building that I essentially flunked out of college on my first go round. I spent all my time reading books that had nothing to do with class, so my education got in the way of my education.

My point is that I’m a fan of books and libraries. More than I am of organized education for the most part.

Anyway, back to my heroism this week.

The college librarians put out a call, offering the contents of a special collection room to anyone on campus who would haul it out. My department chair shared the list with us and took requests. She, our Theater Director, and I went up to the library and filled two cargo vans full of old bound journals (and a few other items), and lugged them across campus and up the spiral staircase that leads to our department offices (the ACE Department — Arts, Communication, and English).

I was limping, sweaty, and aching by the time we were done moving hundreds of bound periodicals to their new home among us nerds. But I’m so happy we did this. The Atlantic, PMLA, Ebony, Commonweal, Harper’s, College English, Art Journal, The English Journal, Ms, The New Yorker, and more… Journals and magazines from the 1930s up into the 1980s were on the chopping block and now they can rest easy again. We have a few empty offices in our wing that can easily be re-purposed as extensions of our library holdings. This feels right and natural.

In fact, I wonder if this is something that English departments across the country should do, in their ongoing quest for meaning and purpose in the digital age? After all, what we are doing here is not categorically different from what the monks of Ireland did during the Middle Ages. Maybe we can be a bomb shelter for knowledge as internet databases and algorithmic research (and whatever the Digital Humanities actually turns out to be) are finished remaking the world. 

But what’s the point?

Save the Books

First, there is a practical use for our work. I will try to remember the physical agony I feel after this endeavor. I want to use it for pedagogical motivation. I am jotting down ideas for exercises and assignments that will require students to dig through these resources. I understand that I am old fashioned, but I absolutely believe that the material culture of writing is an important thing to understand and experience.

But there is also an ideological dimension to this small act of saving old periodicals that no one really needs.

One of the most fashionable conversations that liberal culture warriors love to have right now is about “Banned Books.” Please understand that I am wholly against banning books — more so than many other liberals I would say, since I am also reticent to participate in moralizing, market-driven, banning drives like boycotts and other forms of cancellation.

But our Banned Book discourse misses something important, since it almost exclusively focuses on politicized forms of book removal (and really only political book banning that comes from a crass and unhinged political right wing — that’s really low-hanging fruit).

The removal of knowledge and ideas from society is threatened much more by a boring and utterly practical set of cultural forces.

Call it The Shadow Ban

A hypersensitive, conspiratorial, uninformed person can influence a school board to remove a book from a library, and this is very bad. But, by the numbers, this act is a drop in the bucket when compared to the loss of books due to the mundane, natural, decaying creep of time. Especially when combined with the limitations of institutional space and other resources.

Sure, some readers will say that “they can look that up online.” I could say the same thing about literally any book that gets pulled from a library. Amazon will still sell it, even if Ron De Santis personally scours the shelves of every Florida school library, excising the offenders. Some of the point of this is symbolic, not practical. The act of removing a text is as troubling on a symbolic level as it is on a practical level.

Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts

But let’s address a major elephant in the room with regards to these arguments: some of this material is NOT available online, at least not readily.

As we pried the Harper’s off their old shelves, someone noticed a gorgeous magazine that none of us recognized from the printed out list we were emailed: Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts. None of us were familiar with the magazine, so the title on a list meant nothing. When we encountered this beautiful journal by accident, it lit up for us. We collectively figured, “well our backs are wrenched anyway, what’s one more stack?”

The next day recalled my days as a failed undergraduate, whiling away my days perusing old books; instead of grading, I was pouring over Horizon. I was delighted by what I found (including four film reviews by Saul Bellow from 1962-3). I still need to dive deeply into the magazine, but it seems to me to be an attempt at popularizing Partisan Review, taking the project beyond the obsessions and commitments of the New York Intellectuals. This essay about class and taste is particularly interesting to me and seems like a version of one the Partisan Review crowd’s obsessions.

This magazine is chock full of splendor and all the life of the mind one can handle. If only we had more of this and less of The Daily Beast. This piece about mermaids is a treasure.

But Horizon effectively doesn’t exist in the world because no one will see it. We’ve saved the volumes and are going to open it up for use in our community, but that’s a drop in the cultural ocean. Horizon is a victim of a shadow ban, the pragmatic choices of institutions and markets that eliminate knowledge from public access.

American Heritage, the caretakers of Horizon are running a campaign to digitize the archive as we speak. I hope it’s successful and that the magazine lives on the internet in some form. But honestly, I have my doubts about the effective value of this preservation. Yes, the journal would be searchable and findable (though probably behind some kind of paywall or clunky log-in device). But it will only be findable for someone trying to find it. I assume most people will be like me and not even know it existed. How will people such as me know to look for it? Somethings need to be discovered through serendipity. I will try and assign serendipity to my future students and force them into these stacks that are now much more visible, then just hope for the best (that’s been thought and said — #ht Matthew Arnold).