Tag Archives: libraries

Books – Unread & Banned

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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!

Photo credit: Fuzheado

The unread book

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Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books.

Upstairs, around 200.000 books are on loan. If a book is not taken out during a period of two to three years, it moves onto the ‘null list’ and disappears downstairs. Here a good 400.000 books are stored along 24 km of shelving. At the exhibition, there is an old-fashioned telephone on which visitors can ring and reserve one of the unread books on the ‘nul lijst’.

The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).

There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.

This is the cover of a historical novel, Gewassen Vlees, by Thomas Rosenboom. It won the dutch Libris prize (worth 50,000 Euros) in 1995. It’s over 700 pages long. I am never going to read it. A friend gave it to me. He died in 2000 and that’s the reason it’s still taking up shelf space.