With the start of this year’s National Library Week (April 7–13), I have been reflecting on the power of libraries, which have had such a significant impact on my life.
Growing up in Rajkot, India, I regularly walked nearly an hour to the closest library to check out a book. It was there that I discovered new perspectives and places. My whole world expanded, and my imagination flourished. It didn’t take me long to read the entire children’s section! When my family moved to the United States, my new school library became a place of great comfort, as well as a source of helpful information about this new culture I was in. Knowing that any book that I wanted to read was readily available in my high school library eased my transition to America and guided my intellectual development.
Public and school libraries have long been great equalizers in our society. They provide access to books and information to everyone. Today’s book bans disproportionately affect young people in communities where families rely on their local library or public school to access books, and this is distressing and dangerous. Finding yourself represented in a book is critical. Young people suffer greatly when books about characters who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), or LGBTQIA+, or both are pulled from shelves.
Book ban legislation is often premised on parental rights. Yet these laws fail to respect the rights of parents who want their children to have access to a variety of perspectives. They also fail to account for the rights of other stakeholders: educators, librarians, authors, and most critically, students. Every American student has a constitutional right to access information that is relevant to them. Politically charged, subjective definitions of appropriateness tear the fabric of our democracy. They replace free thinking and independent exploration with orthodoxy.
As publishers, we understand not every book we publish will resonate equally with everyone, but all books deserve the right to be discovered, read, discussed, and debated. Without freedom of expression, books—and therefore knowledge—cannot flourish. Recently, Penguin Random House and other partners have been pursuing litigation as a tool to protect the First Amendment and fight unjust book bans across the country.
There is a long history of using the courts to protect authors and the right to read. In 1933’s United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Random House’s cofounder Bennett Cerf successfully fought for the rights of Ulysses author James Joyce to be published in the United States. We also stood up for authors and readers in 1963’s Bantam Books Inc. v. Sullivan, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that a Rhode Island commission’s actions to protect minors from language or images deemed offensive or obscene were unconstitutional.
More recently, Penguin Random House has joined coalitions of publishers, authors, educators, parents, and students to vindicate our First Amendment rights. We filed a legal challenge in Escambia County, Florida, to return hundreds of books that had been pulled from school libraries. We challenged—and blocked—a statewide ban in Iowa forbidding depictions of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation in school libraries. We also actively support anticensorship litigation across the country, submitting amicus curiae briefs in Arkansas, California, and Texas in support of the right to read. While these suits are ongoing, early results have been overwhelmingly positive.
Librarians are a crucial partner in this fight to protect free expression. Libraries democratize access to literature, ensuring that people from all socioeconomic backgrounds have access to books. Censorship in the form of book bans is a direct threat to democracy and our constitutional rights. Equitable access to books and a wide range of viewpoints are imperative to the work we do every day as publishers to connect authors, their stories, and ideas to readers everywhere.
Penguin Random House trusts professionally trained educators and librarians to help young readers select books and make recommendations for their independent reading. Thank you to the librarians, educators, authors, parents, and students who are fervently—and bravely—fighting against attempts at censorship. We stand with you as a founding partner of the Unite Against Book Bans campaign and hope you will continue to use and share its tools and resources, including the new book résumés tool for frequently challenged titles and the action toolkit on how to talk about book bans.
Let’s all celebrate National Library Week!
