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JoAn Karkos from Maine, America, was recently taken to court for failing to return a library book. She had borrowed a sex education book from her local public library but, having decided the contents were “dangerous” for children and subsequently failing to get the police to bring obscenity charges, she opted to take censorship into her own hands and declared her intention to keep the book.

The book, called It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies,Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, features candid cartoon illustrations on topics such as abstinence, masturbation and sexually-transmitted diseases. Written by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley, it has won various educational awards and has been translated into 21 languages since 1993. Ms Karkos, however, took the view that 36,000 citizens of Lewiston, Maine should be prevented from reading it.

A judge ordered Ms Karkos to pay a $100 fine and she was eventually allowed to leave court. The authorities decided there was no point in sending her to jail and allowing her to become a celebrated sufferer for a cause.

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Historically, there has been a serious problem for those who try to use the law to ban books: their action is commonly counter-productive. Nothing so effectively enlarges a book’s readership as a censor trying to stop people from reading it. As soon as the public in America became aware of the Karkos case, people from around the country sent their copies to the public library in Lewiston.

In 1960, the publishers of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were prosecuted for obscenity. The prosecutor argued that the book wasn’t fit for ordinary people to read because it “commends sensuality almost as a virtue”. He denied the book had literary merit, dismissed the favourable opinions of distinguished writers and critics, and said the book’s characters were just “bodies which continuously had sexual intercourse with one another”. The jury acquitted the publishers and the novel sold three million copies in a year.

Even bad books can get propelled into popularity by legal attempts to suppress them. In 1986, Peter Wright, a former British secret agent, broke a hallowed code of conduct by publishing his memoirs in a book called Spycatcher. He did this having been denied the pension he had expected. Even though the book dwelt on quite stale matters such as outdated spy technologies and dead people, and even though it had already been published in America, the British government resorted to the law to ban the book. There followed two years of global litigation and feverish interest in the volume. The result was that a book later described by one law lord as “a literary work of almost unparalleled tedium and banality” became a bestseller in many countries and sold over a million copies.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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