WE {trade/gift/copy} BANNED BOOKS: An Underground Publisher's Thoughts on the Banned Book Industry

From the Pamphlet:

It is not, in the U.S., Europe, and their global empires, the supposed agents of Democracy who are in charge of banning books; it is the agents of Capitalism. And indeed most of those who vocally oppose the current drive to Ban Books are also vocal critics of corporate excess, if not as stridently anti-capitalist as myself and my immediate community.

And yet… in all of the published lists, news reports, school board meetings, social media memes, etc. etc. etc. I cannot help noticing that nearly every Banned Book that has generated widespread defence already had a well-funded, nationwide promotional campaign and nationwide distribution in bookshops, on Amazon, in library and (where applicable) academic distribution services, all integrated into the proprietary distribution networks that keep shops efficiently supplied with corporate titles while making independently published books nearly impossible for them to deal with administratively.

The instrument of real censorship in our society is not active intimidation, it is passive convenience. If suppression was once the stick, convenience is now the carrot. People today read along the path of least resistance. Our chains are forged from our feeling that ordering a book directly from a publisher, or looking elsewhere than advertising and industry-managed reviews to direct our reading, or even >gasp!< having to order a book through the mail, maybe even through contact with another human being – is just really, you know, inconvenient. This is not unfortunate happenstance; we have been conditioned into this addiction to convenience, which is a euphemism for the fetishization of our own helpless abdication of control over our own lives and thought.

10 pgs on folded 8.5” x 11.
June, A.Da. 106 (2023) $1.00 + 1.00 s/h