For almost a century, an Irish government building in the heart of Dublin has hosted a secret sanctum: the banned books room. The department of justice, on St Stephen’s Green, did not grant public access, because the shelves contained 12,000 books deemed indecent or obscene. It was a graveyard for titles condemned by the Censorship of Publications Board, a guardian of public morals which guillotined anything that smelled of sex or other corruptions …
Banned titles included classics such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Behan’s Borstal Boy and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as pulpy paperbacks with titles such as The Baby Doll Murders, A Doctor and his Mistress and Torrid Tale of a Wicked Town. Scholarly tomes such as Sexual Life in England Past and Present and arcane works such as The Collected Works of Pierre Louÿs, a Belgian poet of the early 20th century, also ended up in what was informally called the banned books room. Read more
