The Most Dangerous Book Quotes

“What's uncanny about censorship in a liberal society is that sooner or later the government's goal is not just to ban objectionable books. It is to act as if they don't exist. The bans themselves should, whenever possible, remain secret, which is to say that the ideal censorship is a recursion of silence.”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

“The New York law described criminal literature with what Ernst called the “six deadly adjectives”: obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting—”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

“The worst part about the censorship regime was that it was maddeningly arbitrary. Books that circulated for years might be banned without warning. Customs officials might declare a book legal only to have the Post Office issue its own ban. A judge or jury could acquit a book one day and condemn it the next, and the wording of the statues themselves stoked confusion. The New York law described criminal literature with what Ernst called the "six deadly adjectives": obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting—lawmakers kept adding words when they updated the law. Multiplying the number of adjectives was a way of papering over the elusiveness of any given designation. What was the difference between obscene and lascivious? If a judge seemed reluctant to find something lewd, a prosecutor could argue that it was disgusting—and every one of those adjectives was subjective.”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

“Joyce kept notebooks and large sheets of paper crammed with character descriptions, lists of rhetorical devices, notes on mathematics, facts about ancient Greece and Homer's Odyssey. Sometimes the notes were arranged by chapter or subject: "Names and Places," "Gulls," "Theosophy," "Blind" and "Recipes." He wrote down phrases and single words, seemingly at random—"tainted curds," "heaventree," "knight of the razor," "boiled shirt," "toro"—and collected them in notebooks, where they waited to be inserted into his manuscript like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses