Access Forbidden: UB Exhibition Unveils Centuries of Banned and Censored Books

by ALISON FRASER

The first major exhibition of UB’s Rare Books Collection since 2006, Access Forbidden: Banned and Censored Books, 1549-1940 explores the persistent failure of book bans and the enduring resilience of the printed word over the past 575 years. The exhibit features many rarely seen materials from the collection, including a 1860s magic lantern slide satirizing Charles Darwin and ephemeral sixteenth-century French political pamphlets.

The invention of the printing press ca. 1450 dramatically changed the status of the book in Western Europe. While censorship predates the press, the mass production of books the press enabled intensified efforts to control who could print and what could be printed. Systematic controls on print and readership, such as the Index librorum prohibitorum (1560-1960) and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1873-1950), attempted to suppress works deemed heretical, immoral, seditious, obscene or otherwise objectionable. Yet book bans fail: many of the books targeted by censors only grew in readership. 

The books in this exhibit advanced civil liberties like freedom of speech, promoted democratic governance, and contributed to the evolution of scientific thought, and their impact continues to impact our lives. The legal case recounted in The Trial of John Peter Zenger, of New-York (1765), for instance, helped shape the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of the press.

Access Forbidden: Banned and Censored Books, 1549-1940 is open to the public in Special Collections, 420 Capen Hall on North Campus, from 10am to 4pm Monday through Friday (with some exceptions). Tours can be arranged by contacting the Rare Books Collection.