Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

Censorship used to occur largely at the level of governments or other transnational authorities. It still does in authoritarian countries such as Iran and China, but western states generally liberalised in the mid-20th century. Yet a weaker form of censorship has long persisted within the American school system, where individual books are subject to “challenge” by parents who consider them inappropriate material for their children. Often, school boards will respond by removing those books from school libraries, in which case they have effectively been banned.

The phenomenon has accelerated in recent years. The machinery of school censorship in the US has also become significantly more corporate. According to the American Library Association’s analysis of its 2024 data, “the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organised movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries.” Between 2001 and 2020, such groups challenged an average of 46 titles per year. Last year, they challenged 4,190 titles in 12 months.

Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in schools and universities has led some school districts in Texas and Florida to proactively remove shelf-fulls of potential offenders within the last 12 months. Earlier this year, meanwhile, a man went into a public library in Ohio, checked out a number of books on Jewish, Black and LGBTQ+ history, and burned them all. The caption to a video of the bonfire read: “We are cleansing our libraries of degenerate filth.” Joseph Goebbels would have approved.