Last year I wrote about the ‘Ongelezen Boeken Club’ (Unread Books Club), a new venture where libraries promoted books on the ‘null list’ – books that have never been taken out.
This year, the ‘Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag’ (National Day of Unread Books) coincides with another new initiative: De Week van het Verboden Boek(The Week of Forbidden Books). Bookshops and libraries throughout the country are showcasing books that have been or are still censored.
On Wikipedia, you can find an article on book censorship, a list of banned books and the main list of books banned by governments. This starts with the Bible and Albania and ends with Yugoslavia.
If I counted correctly: 66 countries. ‘Almost every country places some restrictions on what may be published, although the emphasis and the degree of control differ from country to country and at different periods.’
Wikipedia lists 66 books that have been or are currently banned in India. A small number, relatively speaking. The earliest is a Gujarati translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj. This was banned by the British Authorities in 1909. In August 2025, the Indian Home Department banned 25 books for ‘propagating false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir.’
Here in The Netherlands, there is only one book officially banned: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1924). In 2014, a bookshop owner in Amsterdam was found to stock and sell the book. There was no prosecution.
However, training for new staff in bookshops routinely includes how to deal with aggressive customers. Library staff find returned books with pages torn out. A Dutch survey last year found that (1 in 7) authors had to deal with aggression, threats, intimidation – much of it online.
Here is the cover of Lale Gul’s debut published in 2021, when she was 23. It’s an autobiographical account of growing up in a strict Islamic family. It became a bestseller and was translated, but Lale has since been in hiding.
If Tallinn is on your bucket list, you can visit the Banned Books Museum while you’re there!
I’m delighted to share three poems by Matthew Paul from his new collection with Crooked Spire Press. The poems demonstrate Matthew’s ‘unflinching clarity’, and his ‘fierce attention to detail’. His biography follows the poems and there you can also find a link to his own website.
Spent Matches
Mum lets only Granddad light up in our house. The second Thursday of every other month, she fetches Grandma and him over from Sutton. The chalkhill-blue elegance of the Wedgwood ashtray rhymes with unfiltered smoke rings pixilating like Ceefax in the living-room air.
Teatime doesn’t wait for Dad: Hovis, Primula, Shippam’s fish paste, allotment tomatoes, cress; mini rolls, Penguins, cremated fruitcake; pots of Brooke Bond PG Tips; Beryl Ware replaced by Royal Worcester, on Hay Wain place mats. Chit-chat wilts like Dad’s California poppies.
Mum fills space with monologues. My brothers’ progress; mine. WRVS activities. Her botched hysterectomy. We watch Grandma’s must-see, Crossroads, then ours: ‘Top of the Flops, I call it,’ says Granddad. The outfits, songs, presenters and Legs & Co. baffle him into silence; except
when Julio Iglesias butchers ‘Begin the Beguine’. ‘Artie Shaw!’ he cries; and his and Grandma’s memories spool back to bulletins on the wireless, to Chamberlain’s jubilant declaration of peace. Barely through the door, Dad re-buttons his coat to take them home. Granddad beams, ‘Abyssinia!’
Photo credit: Liam Wilkinson
A Common Hand
I don’t have to prove whether I did it or not; if they can’t see it, what kind of damned experts are they? [. . .] I’m not a crook; I’m just doing what people have always done in the history of the world: ever since art was invented, people have made imitations of it. Eric Hebborn, ‘Portrait of a Master Forger’, Omnibus, BBC TV, 1991
Eric pestles oak gall, gum Arabic, pinches of iron Sulphate and rain into ink with ‘a gorgeous patina’, To pen his line on slyly foxed paper, in the styles Of Pisanello, Poussin and sundry other old masters, Reshaping preparatory sketches to make pentimenti, Faking collectors’ monograms as cherries on top.
At junior school, Eric, aged eight, discovered that Burnt Swan and Vesta matchsticks’ charcoal tips Burnished imagination’s marks, incurring, firstly, Welts from a leathering for possessing matches, Then a three-year stretch in an Essex reformatory For wilfully setting cloakrooms on fire. A flair for Painting sees him into art schools, lastly the RA, Where, though he wins every prize, contemporaries Remember Eric only as ‘a silent creature’; ‘a joke’.
They would say that, since he’s brought their craft Into disrepute. ‘Dealers are not interested in art, but Money,’ he says. ‘The real criminal, if there is one, Is he who makes the false description; guiltier by far Than had he manipulated the nib himself. Ignore The fusspots. Enjoy art, without worrying whether Attributions are correct.’ Museums have everything To lose from uncovering Eric’s handiwork; queasily, They check their acquisitions back to the Sixties And issue, de haut en bas, highly selective denials.
‘No one is studying art with honesty,’ claims Eric, Upon the publication of The Art Forger’s Handbook In Italian. Out in Trastevere three icy nights later, He stumbles, soaked in Chianti Classico Riserva, Down a cobbled passage, to his blunt force demise.
In Which I Spend a Fortnight of my West Berlin Summer in 1987 Doing a Few Hours’ Cleaning Per Day in Some Multinational’s HQ
My Iraqi supervisor Zaynab and I enjoy, for our lingua franca, helpless amusement. Every day, precisely at knocking-off time, we point at the clock, chorus ‘Sechs!’, then cackle like siblings.
Dieter, fellow cleaner, never gets our jokes. Just like me, he’s twenty and nearing the end of a gap year; mandatory, before enrolment at Humboldt. Mine’s elective, for my mental health. He and I view the city’s halves from the roof: the Wall zigzags like the Western Front.
Afterwards, we take the U-Bahn —he buys a ticket; I don’t— to the agency’s office, at Nollendorfplatz. He translates the clerk: I won’t get paid until next week. ‘Scheisse,’ I say. Dieter deadpans: ‘She said, “Ah, so the English boy can speak German after all”’
Biography
Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in June 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. His reviews regularly appear in The Friday Poem and elsewhere. He blogs here.
Acacia Publications 