Banned Books

And speaking of The Independent - it has a new promotion running on Saturdays called "Banned Books." Each week you can buy one of "25 cutting-edge titles, censored classics and literary landmarks" for £3.49 with your Saturday Independent (at selected stores).

They gave away the first in the series, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, on Saturday. I'm a sucker for a freebie, so of course I picked up a copy. Except that I'm not so sure that it has ever actually been banned. I'm pretty certain it hasn't in the UK - indeed I suspect that it's one of the few titles first published in the 1960s to have remained permamently in print. And while the film was unavailable in the UK for many years, that was never "banned" either. Stanley Kubrick simply withdrew it sometime after it had been released following a press furore over supposed copycat attacks, and never allowed it to be re-released or made available on video or DVD in the UK. Of course, nowadays you can easily pick up a copy and it comes around regularly on Film 4 and the like. Unavailable it might have been, but not banned.

I'm not saying that the book wasn't banned in other countries, and I doubt that the novel has been published in, ooh, North Korea or similar. But banned?