If you’re in Amsterdam this month, the city’s main public library near Central Station has a thought-provoking exhibition going on. It’s called Index Americana, and it’s all about books that have
been banned from public and school libraries in the United States under Trump’s government. The idea is simple but powerful: show what’s happening abroad as a warning of what could happen here.
The show is put together by the Ongelezen Boekenclub (the “Unread Books Club”), a group of artists who give forgotten or censored books a second life. Their first project highlighted books that no one ever borrowed. This time, the focus is on books that people can’t borrow anymore because they’ve been pulled from the shelves.
And the numbers are staggering—this year alone, around 2,500 books have been removed in the U.S. The list includes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a chilling dystopia where women lose all rights, and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir about growing up Black and gay in America.
One of the organizers, Bas Jacobs, says the exhibition matters for the Netherlands too. “What happens in the U.S. often finds its way to Europe a few years later,” he explained. Book bans in the States began with a handful of concerned parents, but soon turned into organized campaigns. And in the Netherlands, he notes, some groups are already pushing to restrict books and even school programs. A conservative Catholic group called Civitas Christiana, for example, has run smear campaigns against writers like Pim Lammers and has tried to shut down sex-education initiatives.
Jacobs hopes the exhibition sparks discussion here before things go further. “We need to decide—are we going to follow America’s lead, or are we going to protect our institutions against censorship?”
Interestingly, visitors can actually borrow the books from the exhibition if they ask—but there’s a twist. The organizers want people to feel that sense of frustration, of wanting a book and being told you can’t have it. In the end, they decided not to “take a leaf out of America’s book.”
Index Americana is open at the OBA Oosterdok in Amsterdam until September 30, and admission is free. Photo by Onderwijsgek, Wikimedia commons.