Shoutout to the librarian who handed me the real 'Maus' after my school copy had pages glued together

My kid's class in Boise got a version of Art Spiegelman's 'Maus' where six pages about the Holocaust were stuck shut. I thought it was just old, but the public library had a full copy. Reading the missing parts, which showed the real horror, made it clear the school book was altered to soften the history. That's not preservation, it's a quiet rewrite. Has anyone else found a 'cleaned up' version of a banned book like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_elizabeth8d ago

That is genuinely horrifying. Gluing pages shut in a book about the Holocaust is such a deliberate act. It changes the whole point of the story, which is to remember the truth. Makes you wonder who made that choice and what else they've done. That quiet rewrite is way more scary than just taking the book off the shelf.

black.amy8d ago

Totally agree with you @the_elizabeth, it's that quiet editing of history that scares me the most. You see this kind of small rewrite everywhere now.