Once each year, a large consortium of organizations holds Banned Books Week. For 2023, the dates of this event, during which those wishing to express their individual opposition to the prohibition of people reading books of which other people disapprove, are the 1st through the 7th of October. In years past the titles one was likely to see cited on lists of books the Week’s organizers encourage participants to read as a gesture of protest to books having been been removed from circulation by local library and school boards, councils, and similar small-scale civic organizations primarily included novels and plays from the past century or so that possess substantial literary merit (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, etc.). They were well-known books to not only the better-read people in the society but often widely among the general citizenry as a whole. These days, those seeking to prevent a book from being circulated in a local library or taught in a classroom aren’t – alas – particularly well-read, or in following the general trend in the society, even recreational readers at all.
Consequently, the lists of books “challenged” (the term now used in the process of attempting to prevent circulation or availability of a book) at meetings of boards and councils each year have become increasingly filled with much less well-known books that appear to have been chosen solely to incite the reactionary sensibilities of the public. For example, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson topped the ALA’s 2021 list of books most commonly challenged in the United States. While it’s not a difficult assumption to make that such books are now identified by particularly zealous activists and well-paid pundits in regard to a given book’s utility in stoking the culture war fires, it is a sad testimony indeed that we now appear to have multiple generations who have been so poorly educated and maintain such in-the-moment entertainment-fixated, reactionary mindsets – ironically reminiscent of those seen in the very book that warned its readers of such: Fahrenheit 451 – that books of lasting significance, books that have long proven themselves to convey ideas that are both powerful and timeless, don’t even merit being banned any longer as too few people now have ever read or – even more frightening to contemplate – even heard of them. There is no need to ban a book officially if few people are ever likely to read it in the first place.
But I digress.
Fortunately, for those of us who have a larger perspective on the history of book censorship, many books that have merited the ire of those at levels of power beyond even the wildest dreams of a censoriously minded (insert your preferred stereotypical geographic location here) activist, pundit, or school board or council member are still in print and indeed are even seeing new editions being published. And when it comes to books that not only upset the metaphorical apple cart but felled the entire orchard of toleration (and then made a bonfire with the wood) on the part of those able to wield raw and unmitigated power at a truly global level, few can be said to have accomplished more so than Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems, of which a fresh translation by Mark Davie and William R. Shea will be published by Oxford University Press in February of this very year as an addition to their superb Oxford World’s Classics series.
This same scholarly duo were also responsible for the World’s Classics volume of Galileo’s Selected Writings that preceded this new work in 2012 and included among its other noteworthy and illuminating contents close to the entirety of his Sidereus Nuncius (“Starry Messenger”) that began the tensions between himself and the Vatican in 1610. By now bringing out the first new translation into English in over fifty years of the Dialogue, the book that so eloquently defended the Copernican heliocentric model of the universe but that, despite being widely popular and highly in demand at the time of its publication in 1632, finally exhausted the patience of the Pope Urban VIII – Gailieo’s one-time patron – and by 1633 had the old professor convicted of heresy, under house arrest and personally censored for the rest of his life, and the book added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Prohibited Books”) from which it wasn’t formally removed until 1835. Now that’s book banning!
While even many of the most enthusiastic amateur astronomers and historians of science (and indeed, many professional ones as well) have never read the entirety of the Dialogue, it is a work noteworthy for its lively dialogue between its three characters – with admittedly at one particular spot a bit of mathematics that may be beyond many – and its historical importance. Furthermore, the opportunity presented by this new edition being published in the Oxford World’s Classics series, a collection of books duly famous for many great things but, in my humble opinion, most worthily so for the expertly written and highly informative introductions and extensive explanatory notes they contain, is one that all who would be well-read in the history of science specifically and more generally the history of western civilization as a whole is one that should be taken up with enthusiasm without delay.
