An unburnable edition of Margaret Atwood’s famous work, “The Scarlet Handmaiden”, has been auctioned off to benefit the fight against growing censorship in the United States, its publisher and the publishing house announced on Tuesday. Sotheby’s auction.
The announcement of the operation, which came before the massacre that killed fifteen people, including 14 children, in a school in Texas on Tuesday, is accompanied by a video where the 82-year-old Canadian author, ardent defender of the freedom of expression, seems to spray his book with a flamethrower without managing to burn it.
On sale on the internet until June 7, this particular edition, made from fire-resistant paper, had five offers on Tuesday, the highest at $45,000. Proceeds will be donated to PEN America, which supports endangered authors and artists around the world and fights censorship, Sotheby’s and publisher Penguin Random House said.
In a recent index covering the period July 2021-March 2022, PEN America documented 1,586 instances of censorship affecting 1,145 titles in 86 school districts in 26 states, initiated by elected school councils or state officials. local.
This phenomenon of “banned books” is old in the United States, but for its part, the American Library Association (ALA) has identified 729 procedures to challenge the presence of books in libraries, schools and universities in 2021, representing 1,597 titles, a record in more than 20 years.
“In 2021, libraries found themselves in the midst of a culture war, with conservative groups waging a historic fight to ban and challenge books dealing with racism, gender, politics and sexual identity,” the report said. ALA by presenting these figures in an annual report.
The prize for the most banned book went in 2021 to Gender Queer, where author Maia Kobabe recounts her journey towards a non-binary identity.
“The Scarlet Servant” (1985), a science fiction novel describing a totalitarian regime where women are enslaved, is a work often targeted.
In January, the Holocaust graphic novel “Maus”, by cartoonist Art Spiegelman, a worldwide success, was also banned from a school board in Tennessee, in the conservative south of the United States, for its content deemed “inappropriate”.
