Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes. So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money.
Mattix points out that stories about these “banned” books usually include Amazon links for people who want to purchase them. I’ve long been annoyed by this: a library that chooses not to buy a particular book, or a school that chooses not to assign it, is not banning it — even when the book is wrongly or unwisely sidelined.