Regime-banned books are in school libraries and on indigo bookshelves at eye level for children.
REAL banned books are often decades out of print, going for hundreds of dollars used on eBay, they've been disappeared by publishers and distributors in spite of interest and demand. Others have authors who've died or been imprisoned for their ideas, yet more have been removed from city or university-wide library systems so that their "Misinformation" and "Lies" do not poison impressionable scholars.
Yet more are suppressed algorithmically, not appearing on the author's wikipedia page and not appearing in Google search if you type the author and "book" or "memoirs"... but only appearing when you already know the full title of the work (try this yourself: Type in "Pinochet Memoirs", and then type in "Pinochet: A journey through a life")
Yet others are explicitly banned, some to the point where a mere PDF on your hard drive can result in a decade-long sentence... IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, NEW ZEALAND, and AUSTRIA.
This has been a massive project. over 200 titles on the full list and 10,000 words in my "Cursory" survey.
Let me take you on a journey into the heart of the forbidden
UPDATE: Also Checkout My Addendum to The Real Banned Book list on Holocaust Revisionist Liturature
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Notes -
The null hypothesis is that very few people care about these books, not that there's a government conspiracy to stop you from reading dangerous ideas and tend to their happy flock of sheeple. The fact that someone is willing to spend 200$ on a rare book does not mean that the market will bear the printing of tens of thousands of new copies of said book.
I can find a bunch of books that fit your methodology, but unfortunately didn't make your list; do you think Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story being out of print means that TPTB are terrified you'll start rioting if you read about the sex lives of teenagers in the 80s? Birds of Britain has some pretty women I guess. Maybe if you read Promise me tomorrow you'd think poorly of Nora Roberts, and we can't have that. Here's a couple dozen more you can add.
Not to pile on other people saying the same thing, but I literally borrowed this from my library a year ago for a book club a decade ago. You aren't missing much.
I'm genuinely curious - broadly speaking, what do you think you've learned? If you were trying to sell me on your favorite book or two from your list, what would they be and what do you think I'd gain from reading them?
most of what I see on the list is ignorable drek. And most manifesto's make for awful reading. At best useful to seeing the difference between their literal words vs how the media represents them.
That said On War is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wants to understand war beyond a peasants sense of "Who are the Goodies & Who are the Baddies/Why don't we just nuke everyone as a first resort?" The Michael Howard translation is fine.
Democracy The God that Failed has awful prose and relies a lot on buying in to Austrian Economics but is useful as self-refinement for exactly why one ought to support our current end of history style of government. Either walk away from with a real sense of the unavoidable flaws in democracy, convinced that there must be a better way. Or alternatively confront it's arguments and be made tall by fully understanding the steel man motte for democratic governance.
Or if you want something more readable just go with Caplan's little discussed "Myth of the Rational Voter". People always bring up his education book and his open borders book but his 'Democracy barely works in practice and the academic theory for how it works is hilariously unrealistic' just sits there quietly.
Thanks for the recommendations!
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