Martyn Lyons's "Books, a living
history", Thames&Hudson, London, 2011, brings a chapter
with the title of "The Enemies of the Book" that refers to the
autos-de-fé, constantly being updated since the
medieval inquisitorial practices, as it happened in the
1920 burning down of James Joyce's "Ulyssses" by the American Postal
Service, or in the Third Reich bonfires of 1933. Some fifty
years later Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" were set on fire in front of
TV-cameras in Bradford, England and the National Library of Sarajevo was
completely destroyed by Serbian bombings in 1992*.
Censored authors were also mentioned: Solzhenitsyn, D.H.Lawrence,
Henry Miller and Nabokov ("Lolita".
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*The library of Alexandria is not mentioned here, but it gets an amply
illustrated entry in a chapter solely devoted to it.
.