Dr Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University. Photo: Professor Emma Smith
The works of Roald Dahl have been put through a sanitising process recently, as have the James Bond books, and famous novels by Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad.
The process is often called 'Bowlderizing', a reference to Harriet Bowdler, who in 1807 edited the Family Shakespeare, removing anything she saw as inappropriate. Her brother Thomas did the same for Decline and Fall, Edward Gibbons' history of the Roman Empire.
Book burning or book sanitising is now called 'expurgation'.
One woman who knows all about banned books, and the attention they inadvertently draw, is Dr Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University.
The author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, Smith argues that banning books is ultimately counterproductive - as it tends to draw further attention to these controversial texts.
"I think there is an element of banning books which is completely counterproductive in that it creates a great buzz and excitement about those books and actually makes them circulate far more extensively than they would have done," Smith says.
She cites the attempts to ban DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960s Britain as a prime example.
"There was a big trial which sort of epitomised 1960s attitudes," she says.
"But actually it was an extraordinary prosecution to bring, because before the trial almost nobody had heard of this novel. So however filthy it was, they were not reading it, it had a tiny circulation."
The trial resulted in the novel being republished and the censorship being lifted, while also producing "this extraordinarily large and eager readership for a novel that apparently the authorities were trying to suppress".
While changes made to the latest editions of Roald Dahl's famous children's books attracted widespread outcry, Smith says this literary 'tweaking' is not all that unusual and is often done to increase readership.
A first edition copy of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Photo: AFP / Frederic J Brown
"They've been tweaked on numerous occasions, the Oompah Loompahs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory began really as enslaved peoples and have moved through different iterations of what we think is acceptable for our children to read," she says.
"So these are ways of keeping books that were published decades ago still relevant and still current - they're actually ways of marketing and keeping the books in print, keeping them in the forefront of new generations' consciousness, rather than of restricting them."
While some might see the changes as censorship, Smith says you could also see the process as a way for books to have a much wider circulation - and it might also be a bit of a publicity stunt as well.
"In response to the outcry - and you do wonder if this was always the plan - the publishers said well actually we're going to publish the old style versions as well ... that's leveraging I think the energy that the thought of censorship gives to book sales."
One example of a book that many believe shouldn't be read is Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - which came out of copyright restriction in Germany in 2016.
"The case of Hitler's memoir-manifesto Mein Kampf has been one of the great troubling book censorship issues of the second half of the 20th century and beyond, not least because the famous, infamous book burnings of May 1943, which were a feature of Hitler's Germany relatively early on in his political rule, they came to be the symbol of what Allied forces were fighting against." Smith says.
"So the Americans make a really big deal in 1941 and 42 ... that what they are fighting for is the opposite of book burning, is freedom to read and the freedoms that go with that."
German publishers had two different ways of approaching the republication of Mein Kampf - with the first being to simply publish it as it was in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
"But the other example was a really interesting one," Smith says.
"A historical research unit were subsidised to produce a critical edition of Mein Kampf, which placed the text as if it were a difficult classical text, in a whole network of footnotes and fact-checking, all framed with the kinds of counters to what was being said.
"So everyone who encountered it in that form had to understand it as a document of a particular moment and a particular mind, rather than something to just consume in an uncomplicated way.
"But even that created problems - for some people, that was giving Hitler's words too much credence, making them seem as if they were Plato or something. It's a really, really difficult problem."
In the United States, book-banning has been the focus of recent headlines, as many states ban books with LGBTQ+ topics from school classrooms, citing age appropriateness.
"My opinion is that books are where we find ourselves, books don't turn people into something they're not, but they can be a haven for them," Smith says.
"I would be for absolutely open reading for young people - perhaps with somebody who talks through issues with them as part of that reading.
"I think what's happening, particularly in the American school classroom, is a very frightening restriction of the ability and the necessity for young people to explore their world through fictional characters."
Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has been released from copyright in Germany. Photo: AFP
But, she says, this situation has resulted in a backlash from public libraries in the US, who are trying to make digital copies of challenged books more easily accessible.
"So even this very dark situation I think has, in some quarters, made some of those books more accessible again."
Canadian author Margaret Atwood, whose famous work The Handmaid's Tale was published in a special unburnable edition, has quoted Chaucer in the past, when responding to censorship attempts - "If you don't like this tale, turn the page over and read something else".
It's a sentiment that Smith tends to agree with, to a point.
"I'm not at all arguing for book censorship, which I think is often part of distinctly troubling ideas about civic space and conscience and freedom of speech and so on," she says.
"But I do think we've all got the choice, haven't we, not to read particular things that offend us, but perhaps we've also got the obligation to engage with things that we don't find automatically fit our view of the world."
