Is there any reason to prevent the publication of a book ?: Five renowned booksellers were consulted

In an almost confidential tone, a young woman asked one of the workers at the Hugendubel bookstore in Munich: “Do you have My Hitler Struggle?” The young man, after a few seconds of silence – in which the woman imagined that she would be thrown out of the bookstore – said in the most jovial and carefree way: “of course! Follow me ”.

It was January 2017, more than 90 years after serving as the ideological base of Nazism and, its new edition that had 3,500 critical and historical notes, had already sold some 85,000 copies a few months after its launch. No editions were requisitioned or their sale was prohibited. Should its publication have been prevented? The answer was simple: you had to remember the origin of the horror to show its inapplicability in the present.

Salman Rushdie was not so lucky, by the way. The English author of Indian origin, had to go into hiding for 11 years and have the protection of the English police after Iran’s religious and political leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a ‘fatwa’ (religious edict) urging Muslims of the world to execute Rushdie for having committed the sin of “apostasy or abandonment of the Islamic faith.”

Rushdie’s crime: taking inspiration from the Prophet Muhammad for the protagonist of one of the three stories in his controversial 1988 book “Satanic Verses.” Khomeini offered a $ 3 million reward for his death. He also urged to attack bookstores and assassinate those who supported the dissemination of the aforementioned book. A translator was assassinated, the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi; another stabbed, the Italian Ettore Capriolo, and the Norwegian William Nygaard, shot.

Saving the obvious geographical, temporal, ideological distances and even, of course, of feathers, the case of the irruption to the presentation of Francisco Sagasti’s book, “Let’s imagine a better Peru … and let’s do it”, and the call to “boycott” the book and bookstores that sell it, revive the debate: is there a reason to prevent the publication of a book?

Five renowned booksellers were consulted. Here are his blunt answers.

Guillermo Rivas

Book Vivant Library

Since we opened this Book Vivant project, we have never experienced any kind of violence. Our idea was always to build a space for conversation that allows the visualization of authors, books, publishers, small, independent, that perhaps do not have the commercial power to be in the large chains. The events of the last few days have somehow allowed us to promote this idea of ​​building a space for meeting and dialogue. This is a space for dialogue, for plurality, for bibliodiversity.

Manuel Velarde

La Rebelde Bookstore

This bookstore is the product of cultural activism. We want that from the reading a healthy debate is generated in our country, based on respect, tolerance, and freedom. La Rebelde’s offer is due to a curatorship. We would never offer a bad book or books based on “fake news”. Once a person questioned why we offered books by authors like José Carlos Mariátegui or Karl Marx. Obviously those books are still on our shelves.

Malena Sanseviero

South Library

We sell books of all forms of thought without any prejudice. Our clients can get what they want to read and there will always be a bookseller who can recommend the subject that interests them. It can be difficult to draw a line between what you would sell and what you wouldn’t sell. The book is a tool and can be used for any purpose: to teach, distract, learn or it can also be used as a weapon, that depends on the use and the ethical and moral values ​​of the person who reads it and their freedom to read what want without being singled out or judged.

We have not had aggressions as such, but we have had incidents of people who want to impose their vision of the world, either by selling books with which they did not agree, by allowing pets, by the presence of people who are not to their liking.

Benjamin Corzo

Counterculture Library

This type of actions against the book and against the authors, already occurred in previous years and precisely the inspirers of these ultra-rightist groups, such as the fascists in Germany and Spain, did things like burning books, harassment and took measures against bookstores and authors.

We call on the authorities to enforce the law. In Peru no one is discriminated against, in Peru tolerance prevails and in Peru democracy has to be defended.

The bookstore was founded 20 years ago, in this time we have suffered verbal attacks especially because we have always had images like Mariátegui. People came in saying: why do you have the image of a communist? We also have the figure of Che Guevara.

At first, the bookstore is open to all kinds of thought, but I remember that at some point I received a visit from people from Sendero Luminoso who offered to sell Abimael Guzmán’s books. I refused. With Sendero I have a very clear wound against me.

Law

Ricardo Palacios, administrator of Librería Comunitas, provides the legal basis behind the freedom of bookstores.

When can the distribution and sale of a book be legally prevented?

The principle, in a democratic State like ours, prevails the right to constitutional freedoms, the same that is expressed through freedom of expression (for the writer), freedom of business (for bookstores) and the private autonomy as a guarantee for the consumer. Therefore, we are free to sell any text as long as it does not express a crime (apology for terrorism, for example) or poses a threat to public safety (manuals for the manufacture of bombs, gases or other types of lethal weapons).

What book would you not agree to sell?

We would not agree to sell any book that incites the commission of a crime or encourages hate speech and / or discrimination based on sex, race, religion or political orientation. Outside of these limits, we cannot be prevented from distributing any book because the rights indicated in the previous paragraph would be affected and, even more so, it would imply submitting ourselves to a level of intolerance and arrogance that is unacceptable for a bookstore that prides itself on being independent. and that bears in its name the desire for a just and egalitarian society.