Banned Books Week has been an annual event for the American Library Association since 1982. It is supposed to bring attention to the right to free expression via publishing. Whils this is obviously a US focused event/week, banned books, censorship and the denial of rights to free expression are a worldwide issue. This week (September 23-30) marks the 25th anniversary of this event.

And you guessed it, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are banned from schools and libraries across the USA with some regularity. The ALA Banned Books Week website has J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings listed as "Burned in Alamagordo, N. Mex. (2001) outside Christ Community Church along with other Tolkien novels as satanic. Source: Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, Mar. 2002, p. 61." Did that make our remaining few hundred million copies just a tad more valuable as collectibles?

On another destruction note, did anyone else notice the Tolkien related ephemera auctions running on eBay just now, where the seller is threatening to shred those that don't sell as packing material for those that do? What a good method to get fence-sitters to actually bid... we'll see if it actually works.