Personal Passion

Everyone has a copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but how many people do you know that own, let alone know about, a copy of Jean Respail’s The Camp of the Saints? How about Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal? If so, good, you are helping prevent Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 from shifting from fiction to non-fiction. 

I own all four books listed above; two are banned to the point that they are no longer in print. If it wasn’t obvious yet, I collect actually banned books, or as I like to call them, forbidden books, that were banned and fought to the point where you can’t easily purchase them. 

Not only is this a passion for me, but it also challenges me and keeps my content discovery skills sharp. Finding a forbidden book is complex. Often, you can’t find them for prices under a grand, so the challenge becomes tracking them down for prices that won’t clear my bank account. When you read a forbidden book, you often interact with ideas and concepts that are uncomfortable and challenging, but I still seek to gain value from them.