Telephone call after lunch from Ian, a fellow bookseller from Hull, asking me if I’ve ever been reported to Amazon for selling a ‘banned book.’ Apparently they’d been in touch to rebuke him for selling a history of the Second World War that had a swastika on the cover (almost all books about the Second World War have a swastika on the cover). When he asked them for a list of banned books, they told him that there was no such list, and that they react when notified by a complaint from a customer. Ian—quite fairly—asked them how booksellers could be expected to know what is going to cause
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