Posted on February 2, 2024

A fiery board meeting inspired Penguin Random House to actively challenge the removal of books from school libraries

By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

Jan. 27, 2024

When Penguin Random House held a board meeting in May, book banning was one of several topics on the agenda. It was supposed to be a routine discussion. The company had mostly kept a low profile on the issue.

Then Skip Dye spoke up.

Dye, who oversees U.S. library sales for the global book-publishing giant, launched into an impassioned speech about the company’s handling of the issue, saying the publisher wasn’t doing enough to oppose the removal of hundreds of books from public school libraries and classrooms across the country.

While backers of the book bans believed they were targeting titles that were pornographic or otherwise inappropriate for young people, Dye saw an assault on free speech and on the publisher’s authors.

Novels such as “The Bluest Eye,” written by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Malinda Lo’s National Book Award winner “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” about a young Chinese American lesbian, had been taken off school shelves.

Penguin Random House had previously kept its actions to writing checks for an industry group challenging the bans, and creating a website with information about them. Its peers in publishing had similarly been reticent on the issue.

Dye called for more aggressive action. “I said we needed to do more than support online hashtag campaigns and augment other voices—that we needed to be a voice,” Dye said in an interview, noting that he “apologized for becoming impassioned.”

Penguin Random House chief Nihar Malaviya found his call-to-action persuasive and moving. By the end of the meeting Malaviya had created an “Intellectual Freedom” task force to explore the actions the company could take. He put Dye in charge.

That one high-intensity boardroom exchange ignited the company. It now fully embraces the fight against book bans, entering a sensitive debate that is playing out in school boards and state houses across the country.

At risk: potentially alienating a large chunk of customers on an issue at the crux of culture wars that have polarized the nation in ways not seen in decades.

only major U.S. publisher to join a federal suit in Florida that challenges bans in public school libraries on First Amendment grounds. In November, Penguin Random House filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block school book banning in Iowa.

“We don’t want a small group of parents deciding on who should have access to which books in the entire community,” said Malaviya, 49, in an interview. The publisher’s stance is that teachers, librarians and school administrators, as expert educators, already make decisions about what is appropriate for young readers, and should be left to do their jobs.

Despite the risks, Penguin Random House’s leadership said that failing to act had moral and financial costs.

An internal company report showed that the sales of some banned titles subsequently declined, one by 91%, between 2022 and 2023. That’s been damaging for the company as well as for authors trying to establish their literary careers.

“We have two missions: a cultural mission and a commercial mission,” Malaviya said.

Growing bans

Penguin Random House has started hosting anti-book-banning events, giving away several thousand copies of its most-frequently banned titles, and has orchestrated a letter-writing campaign targeting local and school board officials.

School boards and school districts removed more than 1,500 book titles from an assortment of publishers from public school classrooms and libraries in the 12 months through June 2023, according to a recent study by PEN America, a literary and free-speech organization that has been vocal in opposing bans.

There were 3,362 cases of banned books nationwide, a 33% year-over-year increase. More than 1,400 book bans took place in Florida, followed by 625 bans in Texas.

Parents have expressed concerns about picture books for elementary school students that they said included inappropriate content related to sex and gender.

Lindsey Smith, a parent at Woodfield Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., said a picture book called “Pride Puppy” caught her attention. The book, about a lost dog at a Pride parade, includes an illustration of a person holding a sign that reads “The Future is Intersectional” and a wagon filled with vegetables labeled “Queer Farmers.” Smith, a mother of four who founded a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, described the book as “full of political agendas.”

A spokesman for the school district said books deemed “welcoming and inclusive” were supplemental and “not required.”

Andrew Wooldridge, publisher at Orca Book Publishers, said “Pride Puppy” is intended for children ages 3 to 5. When asked how he responds when parents raise concerns that “Pride Puppy” is inappropriate for young readers, Wooldridge said, “My usual reaction is: have you read the book?”

The U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark 1982 decision, Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, found that the First Amendment provided some protection against school board officials removing books from school libraries.

The current book-banning push has proved a potent political issue and has galvanized intense opposition in some states. In November, about a third of candidates endorsed by the conservative group Moms for Liberty were elected, down from around 45% in prior races.

Those results reflect a survey taken on behalf of the American Library Association in early March 2022 that found a majority of parents believed “school librarians in their district generally listen to the concerns of parents and try to work with them if they have concerns.”

‘Other worlds’

The issue is personal for both Dye and Malaviya. Dye, 61, grew up in a poor household in eastern Tennessee. Access to a school library set him on a different road than the one his parents traveled. He remembers thumbing through “The Boxcar Children” series, books about orphaned children who made a boxcar in the woods into a home, and “Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present,” about a rabbit who helps a girl find a gift for her mom.

“I was very dependent on libraries, particularly my school library,” said Dye. “We had a reading teacher who introduced me to books and other worlds.”

Malaviya immigrated to the U.S. from India as a 13-year-old, knowing little about American history. Eager to learn, he would eat his lunch quickly and then head to the school library to read.

“Having any book that I wanted to read readily available in my high school library was so beneficial to me,” Malaviya wrote in an internal note to staff last fall. “Not every book we publish will resonate equally with everyone, but each of our books deserves the right to be discovered, read, discussed and debated.”

Penguin Random House, he said, had more books on banned lists than any other publisher, and many targeted books were written by underrepresented authors and covered LGBTQ themes. “Book-banning activities have a disproportionate impact on certain books and authors,” Malaviya said in an interview. “We didn’t think it was right.”

The company began to hear from some of its top authors on the issue last year. Jodi Picoult, a bestselling fiction writer whose works have been widely banned across the U.S., privately voiced her concerns last March to Barbara Marcus, president of Random House Children’s Books, at an industry gala, the author said.

“It feels terrible and scary because it’s happening with greater and greater frequency,” Picoult said in an interview. Her banned novels include “Nineteen Minutes,” about a school shooting and its aftermath, and “The Tenth Circle,” which deals with a high school date-rape case. In Iowa, Picoult’s books have been banned in more than 30 school districts, according to a database created by the Des Moines Register.

In his role selling books to school libraries, Dye has heard from librarians like Lindsey Kimery who are on the front lines of the fight, facing parents angry about the books available to their kids. Kimery, the coordinator of library services for Metro Nashville Public Schools, said she became involved in the issue in 2022, when Tennessee began to consider legislation that would ban certain titles.

The backlash she faced for opposing bans took an emotional toll. “I’d come home from work, and then work in the evenings, advocating for public school libraries,” said Kimery. “My hair started falling out. Who hates libraries and librarians?”

Penguin Random House’s board meeting last year was a turning point. Malaviya had been promoted to interim CEO after his predecessor, Markus Dohle, resigned in December 2022 following the company’s failed bid to acquire rival Simon & Schuster. Dohle was a demonstrative leader, comfortable on stage, where he often flashed a thumbs-up.

By contrast, Malaviya, a data expert and technologist, was humble in demeanor and presentation, more comfortable focusing on others and confident that his calm, analytical approach to problem-solving would lead to good outcomes. His style was to lead by listening.

He came to the meeting expecting an update on what the company was already doing. Dye’s impassioned speech resonated with him and other board members and employees listening in.

Jen Loja, president of Penguin Young Readers, said Dye’s tone “conveyed what we in the children’s area had already seen, that it was getting scary.”

Dan Novack, Penguin Random House’s associate general counsel, said he “felt goosebumps.”

Cases in Florida and Iowa

Suing to stop book bans was a major goal for the new task force. The publisher felt targeting individual school districts would be too limiting, so the idea was to focus on states.

“It’s easy to put out a statement saying we deplore censorship, but if we are deploying the assets of the company, we are using time, energy and resources and that investment has to be maximized,” said Novack, who is part of the task force.

When Novack learned the law firm Ballard Spahr was working on a book-banning lawsuit against Escambia County School District in the state of Florida with PEN America, he called an attorney there and asked, “Can we get in?”

Escambia County seemed like the perfect venue for such a fight because its restrictions on public school libraries were, in the publisher’s view, so extreme. The county lets individuals challenge books on grounds they are pornographic or contain depictions of sex, and says those titles should be removed from circulation pending review. The county also restricted access to books by or about the LGBTQ community and books that discuss racism, said Novack.

In an early victory, a federal judge ruled the plaintiffs in the Florida case can pursue their lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. In addition to Penguin Random House, plaintiffs include PEN America, authors and parents of local students.

In Iowa, Penguin Random House is challenging a state education law that bans from classrooms and school libraries books that depict sex acts up to grade 12 or address sexual orientation and gender for kids up to sixth grade.

Titles that have been removed in some Iowa school districts since the law passed include George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” as well as Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer,” a memoir about the author’s exploration of gender identity that includes some sexually explicit images and is recommended for readers at least 18 years old.

The law was passed last year and the penalties, which include potential serious disciplinary action for administrators or teachers, were set to go into effect Jan. 1. The judge’s order late last year, a preliminary injunction, blocked the law as it applies to the book-specific provisions of the law, said Penguin Random House’s Novack.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said last year that books “with graphic depictions of sex acts have absolutely no place in our schools. If these books were movies, they’d be rated R.”

Hailie Bonz, a 17-year-old senior at Urbandale High School and one of the plaintiffs in the publisher’s Iowa suit said the judge’s preliminary injunction meant she can now access such books as John Green’s debut coming-of-age novel “Looking for Alaska” and Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes.”

“I hope this will send a message to other states trying to pass similar laws,” she said.

Daniel Gutmann, a gay middle-school teacher in the Des Moines school district and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said he expects to see further “attacks on public education and marginalized communities” now that a new legislative session is under way in Iowa.

In mid-January, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said the state would challenge the judge’s preliminary injunction.

Making a full-throated public case against book bans has opened Penguin Random House to greater scrutiny. In mid-December, the conservative Canadian website ThePostMillennial.com posted a story focused on the company’s support of Drag Queen Story Hour, which supports people dressed in drag reading to school kids.

The headline read: “Major publisher Penguin distributes books normalizing sex changes for Indigenous Drag Story Hour” and singled out two of the company’s titles: Tyler Feder’s “Bodies Are Cool” and Ria Thundercloud’s “Finding My Dance.”

Malaviya, who was officially named CEO in September, said he expects book banning to remain a hot political issue in 2024.

“There is always the potential for people to misinterpret our actions,” he said. “We aren’t pushing anything on anyone. We’re supporting the experts who make decisions about books.”

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at Jeffrey.Trachtenberg@wsj.com