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A librarian in Kiev showed me the 'restricted shelf' stamp doesn't mean what most people assume
I was talking to a librarian from Kiev about banned literature about 6 months ago, and she corrected something I had wrong for a long time. I always figured a 'restricted' or 'special collection' stamp on a book meant the government wanted it gone. She said in a lot of cases it meant the opposite, those books were tracked and preserved on purpose so officials could keep an eye on who checked them out. The stamp was a surveillance tool, not a removal order. That difference matters because people like me assume a banned book just gets destroyed, but a lot of the time it gets locked up and logged instead. She said their archive still has files on readers from the 70s tied to certain stamps. Has anyone else run into this, where a censorship mark actually means the state kept the book close instead of burning it?
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reese_anderson26d ago
The idea that a restricted stamp means the state kept the book close on purpose is a stretch for me. I get that some archives worked that way, but in most places a restricted stamp meant you needed a reason to see it and most people never got one. The book was still gone from your life either way, whether it sat in a locked room or a fire. Tracking who read what is real, sure, and that librarian knows her own archive better than I do. But calling the stamp a form of saving feels backwards to me. A file on readers from the 70s sounds less like keeping books safe and more like keeping people watched.
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