My excitement grows. "A Year of Reading Dangerously," draws ever nearer. I'm taking notes and getting my thoughts in a row for what I hope will be a year of broadening my mind. Who knows what the future will hold?

With that in mind, I want to take you all on a brief - but as I oxymoronically wrote in the title of this post, rambling - tour of the history of banning books. I will include some highlights and morsels for thought.

I really do believe that we cannot understand the present or the future without understanding the past. (Thanks to that ever philosophical Dane, Soren Kirkegaard for the idea.)

So, follow me friends as we travel back through time (invoke the lab assistant's voice from Futurama)

- We begin in China. The land that actually gave the world paper. Sadly, for all the elegant and invaluable learning and inventions it gave us, it also gives us some of the earliest banning and burning of books. We have references to 3rd Century BC burnings of all philosophical books from lands outside Qin. (Eternal thanks for this and other information to Wikipedia.)

- Next stop, the Middle Ages. Please don your mail coats and ladies, your wimples. While I'm certain there were censorship issues prior to this time, the Middle Ages are a time of much book copying and the Western beginnings of the proliferations of libraries as I consider them. (Please, feel free to contradict or correct me in comments - I do welcome them.)

The Catholic Church had numerous issues with texts ranging from Greek plays to Arabic and Jewish texts. The Bible could not be translated into the vernacular. I consider this banning and censorship of the first order. In keeping with the tour, please abandon any alchemical, heretical, indecent, satanic or otherwise ungodly texts at the local cathedral for prompt destruction.

Abelard, of the doomed love affair, was forced to burn his own books by Church authorities. I personally can't think of anything more wrenching for any author. Countless others had to endure the same fate, some burned along with their texts like the 14th century Servetus.

The irony I find here is that without the tireless copying of texts religious persons engaged in, we would not have a great deal of the literature we hold dear today. A puzzlement.

- Moving forward in time, we shall come to jolly (and possibly wife-icidal) Henry VIII. Not that Henry was any more guilty of banning and burning a few books than many other European nobles of the late Renaissance and Baroque, I like to pick on him partly out of my disgust with Showtime's The Tudors. (I'm sorry but 1) Henry VIII did not look like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, 2) he sure as hell didn't look like that by the time he got to wife number six and 3) I have lots of problems when historical figures (or rather the actors playing said figures) don't age but remain perky breasted, firm chinned and immune to a fat rich diet as the years go by -- Henry VIII was as fat as an Iowa prize-winning pig by the time he got to Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr. Sorry, mini rant.)

Not so good King Harry may have started a new church, but he didn't have a whole lot of use for its principles. Many would agree his personal views were still largely Roman Catholic and, as such, the former Defender of the Faith didn't want the English population reading the Bible in the common tongue.

Henry banned William Tynedale's translation of the book and often took issue in his personal life with the reading habits of his last wife, Catherine Parr. He took so much issue with William Tynedale that he had him burned at the stake as well. I guess the homicidal urges extended to authors as well as wives.

- Let us leave the Tudors and move into the so-called Age of Reason and Enlightenment. (soft chuckle) Buckle shoes and maybe a trip on the Mayflower, anybody?

- We can start over in the Americas with Spanish conquistadors and the destruction of Aztec and Maya sacred texts. Went hand in hand with the whole idea of "saving" the "savages." Who knows what wealth of knowledge and culture we are bereft of there.

-Let's move up Massachusettes, home of both the burnings of Quaker texts and the infamous hangings of witches at Salem. Lots of understanding there from the educated elite, eh?

Boston (now home to some of the great stores of knowledge and books likely worthy of banning to some) saw the imprisonment of two Quaker women, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher over texts they brought with them from Barbados that offended the acting-Governor of the colony, Richard Bellingham. Both women were subjected to full body searches for witch marks and other humiliations before Bellingham torched the books and shipped them home.

This understanding gentleman would later become a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Interesting to me at least, burn a book and later be immortalized in a book. Hmm. I shall ponder it.

- We're starting to move into even more fertile banning territory. As books became more readily and cheaply available and more of the world's population became literate, we're going to see a rise in what we see banned or burned (which to me is the more literal way to ban a book)

While I'm sure my reading fellows could point out many more, I will only mention one 19th Century instance of book banning before we leap into the last century. I note this one because of its unusual nature and the reason for its banning.

- 1842, Paris, France: Officials at the school for the blind in Paris gathered up books written in Braille and burned them. Seems that they didn't want to encourage the adoption of Louis Braille's system for blind reading. Eventually, it became the universial standard. Guess torching the books didn't have the desired effect.

Now, I considered tormenting myself and others by getting into the 20th Century in this post, but upon a decent night's sleep, I decide that I will save the 20th Century (with its numerous book banning incidents) for a separate post.

One day to "A Year!"

I'm excited and can't wait to share some of what I've been reading with you.

Read dangerously!