Saw a whole shelf of books stripped in Paris, who decides what we read?

Went to a small bookshop near the Sorbonne last month and noticed a whole shelf of English titles had their covers torn off or replaced with plain white wrappers. The owner said customs flagged them for content about the Rwanda conflict and some political memoirs. France has its own hate speech laws but these were mostly historical accounts, not calls to violence. On one hand I get stopping stuff that could stir up real harm, but on the other it felt like a library deciding what I can handle. Does anyone else think about how often we accept these quiet removals without asking who benefits? Have you run into a stripped or blocked book in another country and did it change your view on free speech?

2 comments

2 Comments

brooke7120d ago

That shelf scenario is more common than people realize, and I have dealt with it before through a friend who runs a used book stall in Montreal. He gets boxes from France sometimes and the customs stickers are still on them, so he just peels them off and sells the books as is. The rule of thumb he gave me is that if the book has been out for more than a year and no court in the country banned it, the stripping is usually about diplomatic pressure or trade deals, not actual danger. My advice to you is to check if the titles are available on the publisher's own site or through a EU neighbor like Belgium, because that sidesteps the French gatekeepers entirely. Also, keep a list of what you see stripped and ask the shop owner if they can order you a copy direct from the author's agent, that trick has worked for me twice. The quiet part is that these removals rarely get publicized, so the only way to push back is to make the act visible, like posting the titles online with dates and locations. Did you happen to take a photo of the shelf, or at least write down which books were wrapped?

emerychen20d ago

Did the shop keeper mention if the wrapping was done in-store or if the books came that way already? I ran into something similar at a small bookstore in Lyon last spring, and the owner told me the distributor strips them before they even arrive. Posting the titles online with dates is exactly what I did, and within a week another collector from Belgium reached out with leads on two of the titles.