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Down the Rabbit Hole

Library-approved intellectual wandering.

The Queen said, ‘Off with its spine!’, but the words slipped out anyway.

We're exploring… Curiosity, and the Allure of the Suppressed.

This session begins with a whisper behind locked doors, a list of books you’re not supposed to read. From the Vatican’s centuries-long Index Librorum Prohibitorum to today’s quietly vanished titles, the history of book suppression is one of fear, power, and irresistible curiosity. Alice chased a rabbit; readers chase erased margins, vanished covers, and forbidden chapters. 

 

This session invites you to:

  • Examine the history of literary suppression
  • Consider why forbidden books so often become irresistible
  • Follow one accidental detour into the strange life of a book  

What Is This, Anyway?

Literary suppression can involve outright bans (e.g., removing books from libraries or bookstores), burning or destroying texts, blacklisting authors, or using legal measures like fines or imprisonment. Modern methods include algorithmic delisting on digital platforms or pressure to cancel publication.

  Suppressed books or hidden knowledge gain allure because prohibition signals significance. The act of banning a book, whether by burning, blacklisting, or delisting, marks it as dangerous, and thus, powerful. This creates a psychological pull: curiosity thrives on restriction. Just as Alice couldn’t resist the “Drink Me” bottle, readers are drawn to forbidden texts for their promised secrets. The scarcity of banned books, whether physically destroyed or digitally erased,

further fuels their mystique, turning them into cultural artifacts.       

 

Why Does It Matter?

Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, readers of banned books chase the unknown, driven by curiosity and the thrill of the forbidden. Suppression, whether by ancient edicts or modern cancellations, often heightens their allure. Literary suppression creates a “locked door” that piques curiosity, much like Alice’s urge to explore the unknown.

In 213 BCE, China’s Qin Dynasty ordered the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars, destroying Confucian texts to enforce Legalist ideology. Surviving works, like Confucius’s Analects, were preserved in secret, showing how suppression fuels curiosity-driven preservation.

The poet Ovid was exiled in 8 CE, and his works, like Ars Amatoria, were banned for their perceived immorality.

Early Christian texts faced bans under pagan emperors, only to be hidden and circulated by believers.

The Catholic Church tightly controlled religious texts. In 1239, Pope Gregory IX ordered the burning of the Talmud in Paris, fearing its influence on Jewish communities. Manuscripts were laboriously copied in secret. 

The Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559–1966): A formal list of books forbidden for their heretical, immoral, or dangerous content.

Nazi Germany’s 1933 book burnings to Stalin’s airbrushed photographs and disappeared dissidents, control of knowledge was a form of control over reality.

 

Modern Digital Suppression can include Self-Censorship.

Publishers and authors increasingly face pressure to avoid controversial topics,

driven by social media campaigns or fear of cancellation.

Algorithms and sensitivity flags quietly limit visibility,

a modern equivalent of locking books behind closed doors.     

 

Questions

  • What makes an idea “dangerous”? Who decides?
  • Is suppression always intentional? Can it happen through neglect, silence,  or accidental omission?
  • How do libraries protect access to ideas? Is that part of the job? 

Discover

Explore

  • The DigiVatLib platform (digi.vatlib.it) - “The Index Librorum Prohibitorum: The Catholic Church’s List of Forbidden Books” is a descriptive summary, not an exact document title in the Vatican’s Digital Archives. (Some archival materials, especially from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, may have restricted access or require special permissions, even in digital form.)

  • British Library Blog: Discusses a 16th-century Index edition, with images and historical context about banned books like Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  • Notre Dame Rare Books for digitized Index editions. A special collection open to the public.

  • Roman Index of Forbidden Books Betten, F. S. (1909). The Roman Index of forbidden books: Briefly explained for Catholic booklovers and students (2nd ed.). B. Herder. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/62159/62159-h/62159-h.htm

  • Banned Books Week: A Brief History of Book Banning in America" (American Library Association) was established in 1982.
  • "The Burning of the Books in Germany, 1933" - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). 1933: The burning of the books in Germany. History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust. 

  • Canterbury Classics - Canterbury Classics. (2023, October 2). 5 historically banned classics and why.

🗝️ The Librarian Left This Here

In 1931, the Governor of Hunan Province banned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, stating, “Animals should not use human language, and … it [is] disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level” (Heidi Brett, 2016).

Brett, H. (2016, September 29). Banned! — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. U’s Banned Book Blog.

In later decades, the hookah-smoking caterpillar and size-altering mushroom fueled claims that it encouraged drug use, sparking challenges in U.S. schools during the 1960s and beyond. In some U.S. schools, the book has quietly disappeared from reading lists, accused of promoting drug use, disobedience, or “unwholesome” nonsense.

Freudian and Jungian analysts have interpreted the ideas as a dreamscape filled with symbols of the subconscious. Her descent down the rabbit hole has been seen as a metaphor for identity loss or a journey into the unconscious. Her repeated question, “Who in the world am I?” makes her one of literature’s earliest characters to openly confront the idea of selfhood.

Lewis Carroll was a mathematician at Oxford, and many scholars argue that Alice parodies symbolic logic and the abstract math reforms of his time. The nonsensical rules and paradoxes in Wonderland may actually be a critique of overly rigid or modernizing trends in Victorian mathematics.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - The Project Gutenberg eBook of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

“There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.”

~ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland