An unburnable edition of “The Scarlet Handmaiden” auctioned in New York to fight censorship

An unburnable edition of the famous work of Margaret Atwood, The Scarlet Maidwas auctioned for the benefit of the fight against censorship in the United States, a growing phenomenon, announced Tuesday May 24, 2022 its publisher and the auction house Sotheby’s. “Proceeds will be donated to PEN America which champions freedom of expression around the world,” she said in a tweet.

Proceeds will be donated to @penamerican which advocates for free expression around the world. https://t.co/kqxVNIRi98 via @HuffPostEnt

— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 24, 2022

On sale on the internet until June 7, 2022, this particular edition, made from fire-resistant paper, had five offers, the highest at $45,000. The proceeds will be donated to the organization PEN America, which supports authors and artists in danger in the world and fights against censorship, said Sotheby’s and the publisher Penguin Random House.

The announcement of the operation, which came before the massacre that killed fifteen people, including 14 children, in a school in Texas on Tuesday, is accompanied by a video where the 82-year-old Canadian author, ardent defender of freedom of expression , seems to spray his book with a flamethrower without managing to burn it.

In a recent index covering the period July 2021-March 2022, PEN America identified 1,586 cases of censorship affecting 1,145 titles in 86 school districts in 26 states, initiated by elected school councils or local authorities. .

This phenomenon of “banned books” is old in the United States, but for its part, the American Library Association (ALA) has identified 729 procedures to challenge the presence of books in libraries, schools and universities in 2021, representing 1,597 titles, a record in more than 20 years.

“In 2021, libraries found themselves in the midst of a culture war, with conservative groups waging a historic fight to ban and challenge books dealing with racism, gender, politics and sexual identity,” ALA pointed out when presenting these figures in an annual report.

The prize for the most banned book returned in 2021 to Gender Queerwhere author Maia Kobabe recounts her journey to a non-binary identity.

The Scarlet Maid (1985), a novel of anticipation describing a totalitarian regime where women are enslaved, is a work often targeted.

In January, the Holocaust graphic novel Mausby the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, a work with worldwide success, had also been banned from a school board in Tennessee, in the conservative south of the United States, for its content judged “inappropriate”.

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