One of my pet fascinations is banned books. There’s something rebellious about finding out what is banned and then doing it anyway. As kids, we were always told what not to do, and then we went ahead and did it regardless, as an act of youthful defiance.

Even as adults, that defiant attitude has never changed. If someone, especially government, tells you not to do something, you are inclined to stick two fingers up at the Establishment and do it anyway to show them you won’t be pushed around.

Banning books has been going on ever since man learned to put ink to paper. Whether it be the Church or the government, man has been forbidden throughout the ages from reading things deemed not suitable for them. And almost immediately, underground printing presses have sprung into action to cater to the hunger to see and read those banned works. This could be anything from the Bible to a spy’s memoirs, or books by a particular author that the state despises.

A classic example of this was the Nazis who banned and burned any books from Jewish authors and other authors deemed “impure”. To this day, the whole idea of banned books springs to mind the Nazis and their attempts to control the populace by controlling what they read.

There are so many books which have suffered (or benefited depending on how you look at it) from the censors. I have spent years studying this subject and here is a list of banned books which particularly spring to my mind.

1) Spycatcher – Probably the biggest publishing sensation of the 1980’s and a book which made its author, Peter Wright, famous for all the right and wrong reasons. Wright was a spy with Britain’s MI6 and upon his retirement , bitter over disagreements with MI6 over his pension, decided to break all the national security laws he had ever signed up to by writing a book about his career, in particular that the Director-General of MI6 was a Russian agent, as well as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

The book was published in Australia (since that’s where Wright had resettled after his retirement) and the British government took him to court in Sydney to stop the publication of the book. The Australian courts ruled against the British government and, as these things do, turned a book which would have been moderately successful into an international bestseller since everyone wanted to know what the British government was so terrified of their citizens finding out.

In later years though, Wright was heavily criticised after he withdrew allegations from his book that MI5 officers plotted to overthrow the government. The Director-General of the day called him “disruptive” and “ineffective”.

2) The Bible – The Church had always attempted to control the meaning of the Bible by claiming that only trained clergymen “ordained by God” could read it and interpret it properly. Having the book in Latin helped the Church by ensuring that only learned educated people read it, which in those days meant priests. But when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in 1534, he set off a firestorm which not only put his own life in danger but also the lives of anyone caught with a copy.

His translation (which is still disputed because he added a single word of his own which doesn’t appear in the original text) helped pave the way for the English version by King James I in 1611. But the Bible (and its Islamic counterpart, the Koran) has always been suppressed in some form or another. The Soviet Union banned them from 1926 to 1956. In 1996, Singapore convicted a woman for owning a Jehovah’s Witness version of the Bible.

3) Lady Chatterley’s Lover – This is a book by the British author D.H. Lawrence and it had to be published in Italy because British obscenity laws made it impossible for the book to be openly published in Britain (underground editions of the book still appeared though).

The book is a fictional tale of a romance between an aristocratic woman and a working class man. What made the book shocking though was its explicit depictions of sex and its use of “unprintable” words for that time. The ban on the book was finally lifted in Britain in 1960, 32 years after it was first published.

4) Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and various editions of The Arabian Nights were all banned for decades from the U.S. mail under the Comstock Law of 1873. The law is officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act and this law banned the mailing of “lewd”, “indecent”, “filthy”, or “obscene” materials. The Comstock laws are still law today (but largely unenforced).

I could go on and on with such a list of banned books, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, Jack London being banned by the Nazis, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. As long as man prints books and thinks controversial opinions out loud, there will always be someone who wants to censor or ban that book. It’s in the nature of man to destroy anything that frightens them, and ideas are no exception.

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Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer of 20 years experience, and also the managing editor of MakeUseOf.com, since August 2007. You can see his personal website at markoneill.org Mark has 21 post(s) at Free Writing Center