Crossed out, magical and mutilated books: a new tour of the National Library

The National Library of Spain will host the exhibition until February 11, 2024 Bad books, censorship in modern Spain, with 94 original works that include banned, seized, crossed out and mutilated books. Of the total of almost one hundred works, 87 belong to the Library. The exhibition is dedicated to the indices of banned books and their contents already expunged, that is: to the books banned, intervened, crossed out and mutilated, and also to those lost, burned, walled up or thrown into wells.

“Beyond the battle against heresy, against Protestantism and against the Lutheran book, which was its original purpose, the indexes also reached the history, to fiction or prayers and forms of popular piety; transformed the publishing industry, the organization of libraries, the organization of professions and trades around books, and even the conception of writing and reading,” the institution explained.

These books also determined the perception of heterodoxy in other artistic manifestations, such as prints or medals, and generated “a climate of mistrust, guilt and suspicion towards the book and textuality.”

It is about showing that book censorship can be understood as a way of limiting and eradicating religious and political dissent.

The exhibition is organized in two sections, with preamble and epilogue and a brief interlude between both. In this sense, it tries to show that book censorship can be understood as a way of limiting and eradicating religious and political dissent, as an instrument of social control and the creation of convictions, and as a means of accessing the consciences of people. individuals by monitoring reading and intervening in textuality.

“Its most visible tools, although not the only ones, are the banning of books, their transformation through purge —which selectively cuts out or crosses out passages of a manuscript or a printed matter—, the activity of qualification or diagnosis that determines that a text is heretical, erroneous, scandalous, dangerous, slanderous or reckless, or the representation of the reading of bad books as a poisoning of souls or consciences,” they pointed out from the institution.

Two unique pieces affected by censorship and conserved in an extraordinary and random way are missing, since the custodian institutions have not lent them

Organized as if it were a book—with a preamble, epilogue, two chapters and an interlude—this exhibition brings together, for example, several collected books under the title ‘The Traces of the Expurgo’, which are works that have been crossed out, glued together or with pages torn out.

In this exhibition there are missing two unique pieces affected by censorship and preserved in an extraordinary and random way, which because the custodian institutions have not provided them, have been included through a reproduction. It is a printed magical amulet, the Barcarrota payroll, and an erotic engraving of the so-called Toscanini pamphlet, the only surviving printed copy of the first edition of the famous Sixteen Ways.

The National Library of Spain will host the exhibition until February 11, 2024 Bad books, censorship in modern Spain, with 94 original works that include banned, seized, crossed out and mutilated books. Of the total of almost one hundred works, 87 belong to the Library. The exhibition is dedicated to the indices of banned books and their contents already expunged, that is: to the books banned, intervened, crossed out and mutilated, and also to those lost, burned, walled up or thrown into wells.