BANNED BOOKS WEEK 2025

In just one year since Banned Books Week 2024, we have gone from fighting the specter of dictatorship to living in one. All of us who appreciate Winston Churchill, believe that he would have recognized our current metastasizing dictatorship for what it is and called it out just as vehemently as he called out Hitler and Germany’s descent into Nazi dictatorship.

Tragically, for us, Churchill is gone. But we are not deprived of his leadership. We have it in his books, in Churchill’s writings, which contain the wisdom and provide the inspiration for resisting and overcoming what we now face.

Books can do that. That’s why dictators like Hitler, and his exemplars across America today, make books the enemy, banning them relentlessly in local public libraries and, especially, in school libraries. Ban the books, totalitarians recognize, and you control the minds that might read them.

Chartwell Booksellers stands against all of this:  the fascists in Washington and the fascists in our libraries. Banned Books Week is about freedom for readers everywhere. We celebrate it with hope, with fear, and very much with loathing.

Once again, we are honoring Banned Books Week (October 5-12), by donating one dollar from every sale to PEN America in support of PEN’s Banned Books Week fight for the freedom to read whatever you (and your children) want to read.

This year, we are also donating actual banned books to Little Free Libraries in states where these books are being banned. Little Free Libraries are book-sharing boxes placed in neighborhoods around the country (and the world), by the volunteers of Little Free Library, a nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can donate to them HERE.

Or, buy a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or 1984 (once-banned in Nazi Germany, now banned in too many American states); also Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, on our website and we will send it in your name to a Little Free Library in your state.

(Just click on the book links below):

 

 

Please, stand with us now.
Before it’s too late.