The American Library Association’s Banned Books week began on 25^th September. This annual celebration of the ‘freedom to read’ raises awareness of attempts to remove particular books from schools, libraries, and other institutions, as well as official state censorship. The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a database of ‘challenged books’ each year based on newspaper reports and information from the public – should you come across an attempted book suppression, you can report it online via the rather sinister Challenge Reporting Form…

Over here in Europe, this month also sees the centenary celebrations for one of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century poets, György Faludy (1910-2006). Faludy first became known for his translations and rewritings of Franςois Villon’s ballads in the 1930s, but the story of the publication of these and all his subsequent writing is bound up with a traumatic period in the history of central Europe. Faludy’s criticism of the totalitarian regimes in his native country resulted in multiple periods of exile and imprisonment during the 1940s and 1950s. In Hungary his books were burned by the ruling fascist Arrow Cross party in the 1940s, and pulped during the communist regime that followed. For many decades his work circulated in samizdat printings.

Faludy spent several years in the forced labour camp at Recsk, where he sustained the spirits of the other prisoners by giving lectures and readings, and composed poetry without any writing tools. After the revolution of October 1956, he settled in London, subsequently moving to Canada where he lectured at universities there and in the USA and Europe. He returned to Hungary in 1988, when at last his work began to be published openly. Even in 1985, the Preface to an English edition of the Selected Poems 1933-1980 stated ‘Another Hungarian periodical committed a kind of suicide last year when it published an essay pointing out how ludicrous it was that, although Faludy was beyond doubt Hungary’s greatest poet, none of his works could be printed or purchased in his native country’.

The works in Selected Poems 1933-1980, ed. and trans. Robin Skelton et al (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), make frequent allusions to books, conveying Faludy’s profound sense of the printed word as something simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable. With ‘In the Reading Room of the British Museum’ (London, 1967) Faludy celebrates the intellectual freedom of his regular Reading Room companions in a place ‘where factory whistles never sound, and money/ never talks – where silence hovers over worth’. These people, liberated by reading, will ‘on their deathbeds’ know ‘in silence what a billion men/will never know: that, living, they were alive’. In ‘Tibet’ (London, 1957) Faludy contrasts a peaceful domestic scene of reading and writing with the political events happening in the Far East: ‘Standing at monastery windows/ they are throwing out books’. These powerful images of destruction remind Faludy of his own country and its sufferings:  ‘Wretched we who left Hungary,/ wretched those left behind’. The volume concludes with ‘Learn by heart this poem of mine’ (Toronto, 1980), in which he laments

[…]

books only last a little time

and this one will be borrowed, scarred,

burned by the Hungarian border guards,

lost by the library, broken-backed,

its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,

worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,

or slowly brown and self-combust

when climbing Fahrenheit has got

to 451, for that’s how hot

your town will be when it burns down.

Learn by heart this poem of mine.

The poem anticipates an apocalyptic destruction of humanity by itself, and the surprising final line – ‘You must forget this poem of mine’ – reminds us of the controversial issues of materiality that always surround the works of writers with views considered unsavoury by those in power. Sometimes even the human memory, Faludy suggests in this poem, is too dangerous a place for words to be preserved.

Miltonists the world over will be groaning at the news that a new poem has just been attributed to their man. The 8-line ‘Extempore upon a Faggot’, discovered by Oxford academic Jennifer Batt, is a fine example of the sort of throwaway crudeness that overwhelms the printed and handwritten verse miscellanies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. ‘Have you not in a Chimney seen / A Faggot which is moist and green / How coyly it receives the Heat / And at both ends do’s weep and sweat? / So fares it with a tender Maid / When first upon her Back she’s laid / But like dry Wood th’ experienced Dame / Cracks and rejoices in the Flame.’

Batt herself suspects that the lines may be by John Suckling; perhaps he added the name of Milton to discredit the fiery radical, for whom faggots would have been associated more with burning martyrs than lustful dames. Myself, I’m holding out for Robert Herrick, whose poem ‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast’ opens with a similar turn of phrase–‘Have ye beheld (with much delight) / A red rose peeping through a white?’–and shares the aim of using things in the world to provoke lascivious thoughts in the (probably male) reader.

Given what we know about the vagaries of lyric authorship in the early modern period, we may need a moratorium on the announcement of new discoveries of this kind. One thinks back to the debates which raged when Gary Taylor discovered an ungainly poem beginning ‘Shall I die?’ with an attribution to Shakespeare in a Bodleian manuscript. But poetic miscellanies and anthologies also give us a valuable glimpse into a period’s literary undergrowth and force us to ask exactly how we can know who wrote what–which is often an extremely challenging and worthwhile question.

Light relief from all the rumours of wars in recent posts comes in the news that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has angered fans by publishing his autobiography-in-pictures as a leather-bound, silk-wrapped ‘work of art’ retailing at £445. Printed on ‘fine art paper’ in a limited edition of 2,500 copies, the book will join a long tradition of luxury publications stretching back to the origins of the codex–a tradition largely invisible to the average modern reader, for whom the idea of the book is tied to ideas of egalitarianism, democracy, and the free (or cheap) exchange of information. Page linked his choice of medium to his own desire to have a library and his appreciation of fine bookbinding.

Meanwhile this week’s Times Literary Supplement has a blood-red triangle in a corner of the front cover, advertising an article on ‘books bound in human skin’. ‘Anthropodermic bibliopegy’, the article reports, took off in the eighteenth century, ‘when binding the Lives of executed criminals in their own skin became a bit of a fad.’ An example, a copy of a blank paper book supposedly bound in ‘Tanned Skin from the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence’, is currently on display in a Wellcome Collection exhibition entitled ‘Skin‘. The TLS piece, by Jill Lepore of Harvard, does a wonderful job of teasing out the historical ambiguities that accumulate around this volume. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Jimmy Page any gruesome ideas.

Yet more material texts in the headlines for political reasons: as the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York approaches, a preacher in Florida has announced his intention to burn copies of the Qur’an outside his church on Saturday. Needless to say, his views have provoked horror and outrage. Again, without wishing to over-simplify the complex issues surrounding this threat and the responses it has had from across the globe, this incident is a dramatic reminder of the political importance of all sacred texts as material objects which symbolise tolerance and respect.

Sales of Tony Blair’s autobiography A Journey may be slowed by a new campaign instigated by a 24-year-old nursing student named Euan Booth. Booth set up a Facebook group entitled ‘Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in the bookshops’. More than 5,000 people are now engaged in the effort to reclassify the book (some have opted for ‘Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror’ rather than ‘Crime’). Without wishing to devalue the political issues at the heart of this protest, it’s interesting as an example of the interaction of digital and print media, and as a reminder of how far the interpretation of a book might be affected by the company it keeps.

A poignant image from the news this week: miniature bibles about to be sent 700 metres underground to the 33 men trapped in a Chilean mine. This scene illustrates starkly the practical importance of the materiality of texts – only volumes as small as these will fit in the narrow tube that connects these men to the surface. In this extreme but real-life context, the physical properties of these books have as much significance as their textual content. (Photo from www.guardian.co.uk).