Prairie Lights Bookstore, located in Iowa City, needed to close it doors early on Tuesday night after the store received both threatening phone calls and letters in response to an event scheduled to take place that evening. The event was a reading by Krista Jacob, the editor of the recently released book Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice. The book is a collection of essays by a number of feminist writers that explores the impact of race, economics and culture on women’s reproduction rights and women’s attitudes toward abortion.
“This bookseller doesn’t understand the impact of this [decision]. This is a tremendous victory for the local antichoice movement. They just censored a writer,” Jacob said. Although aware of the cancellation in advance Jacob still showed up and joined about 15 people who gathered outside the closed store. In addition to the canceled reading Iowa Public Radio, which planned to broadcast the reading live, canceled their Live from Prairie Lights event scheduled for that evening as well.
Of course the safety of the staff and the customers are of primary concern but I do agree that by canceling the reading we are sending the wrong the message to the anti-choice movement. What other steps were taken by the bookstore’s owner beside deciding to close the store? Did he contact the local law enforcement authorities and request additional security? Or the local Planned Parenthood to see how they handle similar threats. To simply fold so quickly when confronted with this type of behavior can be seen as a sign of weakness. Link to Publishers Weekly article.
At the end of January the Supreme Court of Canada shot down Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Bookstore quest to secure the funding from Canada Customs that it will need to pay its “interim legal costs and continue its fight against the government’s book banning practices at the border.” Since 1990 Little Sister’s, which is a gay and lesbian bookstore, has been battling Canadian Customs. It seems Customs has continually been seizing books and magazines destined for their store, claiming the material to be “obscene.” The National Writers Union of Canada has issued this press release in support of their struggle. The press release also brings to our attention some other book banning activities of Canadian Customs :
Canada Customs has had a long history of border book banning. In addition to preventing the importation of such books as Ulysses, Peyton Place, and Tropic of Cancer, Canada Customs embarrassed the Mulroney government when, in 1999, it was the only country on the western world to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, a decision quickly reversed by Mulroney.
There must be more pressing issues facing Customs than to be on the lookout for such “obscene” material?
Thanks to Bookninja for the lead on Little Sister’s plight