There’s certain words that would get you in big trouble if they were included in the title of a new book. Unfortunately for rare book dealers, what was considered acceptable 50 or 100 years ago isn’t acceptable now. This leaves the book dealer in a bit of a bind. What to do with books that have racial slurs in the title or offensive cover artwork? Destroy them as hateful relics of ages past? Hide them behind the counter? Treat them just like any other old book?
While the safe option might seem to be to destroy them, in many ways this is worse than keeping them in circulation. This whitewashes the past. It sanitizes it and makes it easy to pretend certain things didn’t happen. Things weren’t THAT bad. Surely it’s being exagerated…
