Not Censorship But Selection

T HERE IS A N A MUS ING WORD GAME with which many of you are familiar in which the object is to trace an action, a point of view, or a characteristic through the gamut of its connotations from the most to the least acceptable. The point of the game is that the most admirable aspect of the characteristic is always assigned by the speaker to himself, whereas the least attractive aspect is taken to be that which characterizes somebody else. Thus, "I know the value of a dollar; he is miserly." To many, the title of my paper would seem to reflect a similar tendency. I select but he censors. When librarians discuss the matter among themselves, they are quite satisfied with the distinction between censorship and selection, and are in smug agreement that the librarian practices the latter, not the former. Nonlibrarians are less disposed to be so generous in their interpretation of the librarian's action. Thus in its article on censorship, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences points out that "Libraries and booksellers have sometimes undertaken to censor books, declaring that they would not circulate books 'personally scandalous, libelous, immoral, or otherwise disagreeable,' " and Morris Ernst is even more outspoken: