Banned Bookshelf

A history of book banning, from ancient China to Amazon

Who bans books has changed over the centuries: emperors, churches, customs officers, prosecutors, dictatorships, and now retailers and online platforms. The reasons have stayed recognisable: religion, politics, sex, and state secrets. This timeline links each event to the book's page in our catalogue where we have it.

Before printing

  • c. 360s BC: in the Republic, Plato argues that an ideal state should censor poets and storytellers. A long-running list of banned books, Anne Lyon Haight's Banned Books: 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D., starts its record in this era.
  • 213 BC: China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, orders the burning of histories and philosophy books other than approved ones: one of the earliest recorded mass book burnings.

1500s–1600s: printing and the Index

  • 1517–1520: Martin Luther's writings spread by the new printing presses; the Pope condemns them and they are burned in public.
  • 1559: the Catholic Church issues its first Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum). The Prince is on it. The Index lasts until 1966. See books on the Vatican's Index.
  • 1616: Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is suspended "until corrected".
  • 1633: after his trial, Galileo's Dialogue goes on the Index.

1700s: Enlightenment and sedition

  • 1748: John Cleland is arrested over Fanny Hill.
  • 1759: Candide is condemned and seized in Geneva and Paris.
  • 1792: Thomas Paine is convicted of seditious libel in Britain for Rights of Man.

1800s: obscenity laws

  • 1821: Fanny Hill is prosecuted in Massachusetts, one of the first US obscenity cases over a book.
  • 1857: Flaubert is tried and acquitted over Madame Bovary.
  • 1873: the US Comstock Act bans mailing "obscene" material, the legal basis for decades of book seizures.
  • 1882: a Boston prosecutor's threat makes the publisher withdraw Leaves of Grass.

1900s–1940s: modernism, dictators and war

1950s–1960s: the obscenity trials end

  • 1956–1958: France bans Lolita.
  • 1957: Howl is seized and then cleared in San Francisco. Doctor Zhivago, refused in the USSR, is published in Italy.
  • 1960: Penguin is acquitted in the Lady Chatterley trial.
  • 1964: the US Supreme Court rules Tropic of Cancer not obscene.
  • 1966: the US Supreme Court clears Fanny Hill, Massachusetts clears Naked Lunch, and the Church abolishes the Index.
  • 1967: Fahrenheit 451's publisher starts selling an expurgated school edition.

1970s–1990s: secrets and fatwas

  • 1973–1974: The Gulag Archipelago is published in Paris; Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the USSR.
  • 1987–1988: the British government fights Spycatcher in the courts and loses in the House of Lords.
  • 1988–1989: India bans the import of The Satanic Verses; Iran issues a fatwa against its author.
  • 1990: Israel briefly wins a US court order against By Way of Deception.
  • 1991: a publisher withdraws Children for the Devil after a libel complaint. Wild Swans is published, and later banned in mainland China.
  • 1999: St. Martin's Press recalls and pulps Fortunate Son.

2000s–today: retailers and platforms

  • Bans by governments become rare in the West; the gatekeepers become retailers and platforms. Amazon, which sells most books bought in the US, removes titles it considers hateful or offensive, including many QAnon books in 2020 such as Revolution Q. See books banned by Amazon.
  • Video platforms remove reviews of controversial books even when the books stay on sale. See The Witnesses.
  • Price becomes a quieter barrier: out-of-print titles can cost hundreds. See out of print / scarce.

For what "banned" means today, read are banned books really banned?