COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
C O L U i\I N S     tf
 

The Vicissitudes of Books
 

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N(^^'ENTY-FIVE books and documents which ha\c been
banned or destroyed, many of them considered to be
among the world's great masterpieces, will be on exhibit
in Butler Library until June 30. The exhibition is part of the Uni¬
versity's Bicentennial celebration and was designed to suggest the
problem of censorship and its bearing on the Bicentennial theme,
"iMan's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof." Among
items included are Thucydides' account of Pericles' funeral
oration, which was banned in 1937 in Greece; the copy of Ulysses,
by James Joyce, which was seized as the basis for the famous 1935
test case; a first edition of Boris Godimov, by Alexander Pushkin,
which was personally censored by Czar Nicholas 1 of Russia; and
Ovid's Ars Amatoria, for which he was banished from Rome by
Augustus Caesar in 8 B.C.

The vicissitudes of books! In this issue, Roland Baughman
writes of their forging (he plans an exhibit for this summer of "the
Wise Forgeries"), and Polly Lada-Mocarski and Laura S. Young
warn of their fragility and su.sceptibility to decay. Banned, burned,
forged and neglected—it is a grim picture. But some books ha\'C
happier fates. So, if the reader will turn the page, he will find
mention in John Murray Cuddihy's article of a volume which lias
 

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