This tweet about toasting marshmallows on a fire stoked with Harry Potters brought to mind an odd incident from my childhood.

To the amusement of the world, my home town decided to ban a classic of medieval Italian literature as obscene and pornographic. The year was 1954 and book was Boccaccio’s Decameron. Until that point only three people in the town had heard of the book and even fewer had read it.

Now it was in demand in Swindon.  And Swindon – hitherto best known as the birthplace of  blonde bombshell Diana Dors and for making magnificent steam trains – was famous too.

This book-banning story was revived locally six years later when another notorious book was on trial for obscenity. The case made national headlines for weeks and I followed the story avidly. Reading about the  trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover  in 1960 sent me on a hunt to find the this wicked book the Decameron. I distinctly remember how disappointing it was as a source of titillation and smut as it seemed merely to be a whole pile of stories about adulterous Italians hiding in vats and so on. 

My parents bought a copy of  Lady Chatterley – purchase price three shillings and sixpence – and seen here today on my bookshelf.

They hid it amid the tea towels in a cupboard in the kitchen where I was sure to find it as this had been used to hide the comic books my mother had deemed unsuitable reading. (Full credit there mum, for not just destroying them.)

My Body is Me

Books, of course, have been condemned, confiscated banned and burned since the invention of the printing press. I recently came across a curious case of an illustrated book for toddlers that has caused considerable controversy in the world of children’s publishing in the UK.

The book is My Body is Me by Rachel Rooney with delightful illustrations by Jessica Ahlberg. Trigger warning: the text is a poem and apparently highly controversial! If you don’t get why, check the link. 

Rachel Rooney has written several successful books for children now says her career is over for the crime of telling the truth “two and a half years of intensive bullying for doing nothing more than telling the truth”:

Here’s a page from the book, which, as you can see is very shocking:

And then there’s the case of Gillian Phillip.

Phillip was a successful author under contract to Working Partners. As Erin Hunter, she was one of a team of writers of the Braveland books for children published by Harper Collins.

Last week Phillip testified at a preliminary tribunal hearing to determine whether her case can proceed to a full employment tribunal.

Phillip is alleging that she was discriminated against for her age and for her opinions. She claims that when she added the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter account in 2020, her publishers HarperCollins and book creators Working Partners terminated her contract. 

Both had known about her gender critical views, but her support of JK Rowling generated a Twitter storm which Philip believes led to a coordinated attempt to get her fired which then succeeded. You can read more about the case – and keep up with the tribunal proceedings – here.

She is now training for a new career as a HGV lorry driver. 

Phillip may have committed all manner of crimes in her lifetime but none so egregious as supporting  J.K.Rowling on Twitter.

I must be among the very few in the book-reading universe who has never read any Harry Potter book nor seen any of the films. But I do follow Rowling on Twitter where she is invariably humane.

You have to hand it to JKR for so uniting the ideologues from both ends of the political spectrum in frothing outrage. On the one hand, she and her books must be burned and banned for promoting Satanism, black magic rituals and wizardry. And on the other for promoting genocide and committing literal violence. Both extremes seem to be morivated by an irrational religious fervor the tone and rage of which is often quite gobsmacking in its relentless ferocity. 

So just what is JKR’s crime?

Examples of the worst of her violent and incendiary Tweets seems in order. I can see how the MAGA crowd would object to her tweeted reaction to the election victory of tRump in November 2016. 

But now consider this outrageous example of extreme bigotry and hatred that created a tweetstorm of mega proportions. Rowling was tweeting support for Maya Forstater who had lost her job for stating her opinion that people cannot change their biological sex.

Incidentally, one of those magnificent steam trains made at the Swindon GWR Works was The Hogwarts Express. It began its life as a Hall-class locomotive GWR 5972, known as Olton Hall, built in 1937.  It had been rusting in a Welsh scrapyard when volunteers began the long process of restoration before Warner Brothers brought back its former glory with a magical makeover.