The Globe and Mail (Canada's National Newspaper!
) put out a poster, many years ago, which I still have, that depicts "A collection of bestsellers that have been banned or burned throughout history." The pictures are all of the charred remains of burned books (quite poignant), except the last, which shows a book still on fire. Here they are, in order with their dates:
387 BC - Homer - The Odyssey
250 BC - Confucius - Analects
553 - Various Authors - The Bible
1497 - Dante, Alighieri - La Divina Commedia
1517 - Luther, Martin - Works
1632 - Galilei, Galileo - Dialogo dei due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo
1597 - Shakespeare, William - The Tragedie of King Richard the Second
1641 - Descartes, Rene - Meditationes de Prima Philosophia
1726 - Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
1733 - Voltaire, Francois - Lettres Philosophique sur les Anglais
1852 - Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
1885 - Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1895 - Wilde, Oscar - Salome
1922 - Joyce, James - Ulysses
1925 - Darwin, Charles Robert - On the Origin of Species
1934 - Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer
1955 - Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
1969 - Roth, Philip - Portnoy's Complaint
1988 - Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses
I'm embarrassed to admit I've only read about five of them....So many books, so little time! (I don't concentrate on banned/burned literature, though...!) I still have the poster up, to remind me of what I'm missing. It was an ad for the "National Books Bestseller List" on Saturdays.
Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
