The Index librorum prohibitorum – the dreaded Index – is the official list of books once prohibited by the Catholic Church.
The Index dates back to the momentous years of the Counter-Reformation, when the church (and many state) authorities felt themselves to be in the midst of the ultimate battle for the souls of humanity – or their lucrative power base, depending on which side of the Reformation you’re on.
One of their bright ideas, along with torture and burning people at the stake, was to compile a single list of books that no God-fearing man (and I use the term advisedly) should possess or read.
The idea was first formally introduced in 1557 with the publication of the Index auctorum et librorum prohibitorum under the direction of Pope Paul IV. The Pauline Index, as it became known, was the first in a long succession of papal indices, forty-two in all.
The 32nd edition, for example, published in 1948, contained 4,000 titles, including many that were banned on the basis of politics or morality, rather than heresy.
Authors who made it onto the ultimate A-list include Hugo, Rabelais, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert and Voltaire – basically the golden ages of French literature. Pierre Larousse, compiler of the Grand Dictionnaire Universel, found it banned after all those years of work. Words, it seems, are dangerous even if only in dictionaries.
Perhaps more significant in terms of the effects on other writers and thinkers were the bans on Copernicus and Galileo (for trying to understand the universe), Spinoza (expelled by the Jewish community as well), Erasmus (perhaps the greatest mind of all) and Bruno (who burned along with his books). Those of you who suffered through Milton at school may be shocked to learn he made the list (he was a die-hard Puritan), as did swashbuckler Dumas, pirate enthusiast Defoe, and Swift of Gulliver fame. They were in good company, along with Descartes, Machiavelli, Locke, Hume, Paine, Rousseau and even Madame De Stael: perhaps the only thing these names have in common is that what they wrote was banned.
More recently, of course, the Index has included books by Gide, Sartre and Joyce but, strangely enough, not Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Even more amazingly, recent research indicates that the inquisitors in the Sacred Congregation of the Index never had a problem with Darwin.
It was in force until a mere forty years ago this week. Another Paul, Pope Paul VI, abolished the Index on June 14 1966.
As we know, there are plenty of people who wish it were still in place – with JK Rowling’s name high on the list.

Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
~ Heinrich Heine (who was also on the Index)

History for a greedy novelist like me is just one more place to pillage. What we’re after, of course, is stories, and we know that history is bulging with beauties. Having found them, we then proceed to fiddle with them to make them the way we want them to be, rather than the way they really were. We get it wrong, wilfully and knowingly. But perhaps you could say that the very flagrency of our ‘getting it wrong’ points to the fact that all stories – even the history ‘story’ – are made. They have an agenda, even if it’s an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ways to get it right.
– Kate Grenville
(Interviewed in The Telegraph)

David Dale in the Sydney Morning Herald looks at the latest publishing figures and suggests:

“If you want to create a bestseller in Australia, here is this year’s formula: ‘The Magic Bum Cleaning Diet Code for Cricketers’. To maximise your sales, you will need elements of self-help, suspense, fantasy, autobiography, spirituality and a film tie-in. Plus fart jokes. And you should change your name to Dan Brown.”

You write not for children but for yourself, and if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then, you are a writer of children’s books … no special credit to you, but simply thumping good luck.
– Arthur Ransome

“I think of the past as the ultimate holiday destination,” Geraldine McCaughrean told the BBC History magazine last year.

“Life today is pretty safe and anodyne: adventure doesn’t abound for children. But in the past there were any number of ways you could meet a horrible end before the age of 12. So it’s possible to write a plausible-sounding, danger-packed adventure involving children in war, pestilence, fire and/or flood. That’s the only reason I go there.”

Philip Pullman agreed.

“It’s hard to put modern children in an adventure story because there would always be a parent or a policeman or social worker to tell them not to do things. So one way to put children in an exciting adventure is to set it in the past and arrange it plausibly.”

Quite so. But in the plausibility mentioned by both lies a thicket of modern and historical dilemmas for the author and dangers for the readers – particularly, I think, for adult readers who are the gatekeepers of the books children read.
For the writer of historical fiction, something that has been extensively researched and is perfectly plausible in an historical sense might appear to be utterly incongruous to the modern reader: either because it is so other-worldly that it seems almost fantastical; or conversely, because sometimes historical truth is stranger than fiction.
As readers we project the values of their own lives onto the past as well as the logic of 20th to 21st century thought – the unconscious knowledge of a whole raft of meanings, such as Freud or physics or atheism or racism/anti-racism. You might suspend disbelief when you read a book about a 12-year-old girl pirate, but you don’t suspend your entire world view.
We forget, for example, that until quite late in the 20th century (and today in many parts of the world) children worked at a very young age, girls got married off as soon as they hit puberty, people died in middle age as a matter of course, and everyone grew up much earlier than we do now.
Only last week, marine archaeologists in the US discovered the remains of John King, who was 11 when pirates captured the ship on which he and his mother were sailing in the Caribbean. John joined the pirate crew, led by Captain Sam Bellamy.
290 years later, John’s remains have been found in the wreck of Bellamy’s ship, the Whydah, 460 metres off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The research team said, “While teenage pirates were common in the 18th century, John is considered to be the youngest ever identified.”
Gosh, people said to me when this appeared in the papers, you mean there really were kids who were pirates? Well, of course. Nelson went to sea at 13, Bligh at 9. There were eight-year-old farm hands and milkmaids, and ten-year-old fishermen and housemaids. Romeo and Juliet were kids. So are many of the characters in nursery rhymes and fairy tales, who have working lives, go to the market, milk cows and tend sheep and sleep in the fireplace and put kettles on – and are so often hungry.
This particularly applied, of course, to poorer families; that is, almost everyone. But most of the books we read in the past were about aristocratic children who had the luxury of growing up at a more leisurely pace. We must not confuse the fictional world of The Secret Garden with the harsh world of kids like Dickon.
So the writer has to know this is going on in the readers’ mind, anticipate her own projections, and sift through them all to see which ones are helpful and which should be avoided or addressed.
And then watch it all happen anyway.

I’ve lost count of the dilemmas list and Blogger search isn’t working, but here, I think, is the previous post: Historical fiction dilemma #4: Character.

A dazzling layer of ice on the car, and frost in the valley, this morning. (That might not sound very impressive to those of you who live in colder climes but Australians are dreadful wimps when it comes to winter.)
Today I have to drag myself out of 17th century Amsterdam and back to 18th century Maltese pirates, as I’m working on the edited pages of the second Swashbuckler book, The Pirate’s Revenge. It’s been so long since I last read it, I get to laugh at my own jokes – and notice things I was too close to see before. But at least I know the ending.
It’s due out in September/October.
Just heard that the first book, Ocean Without End, is going into its second print run, as it’s nearly sold out – fantastic news.

The New York Times looks at product placement in a new YA book from Running Press:

In Cathy’s Book, a young adult novel to be published in September, the spunky eponymous heroine talks about wearing “a killer coat of Lipslicks in Daring.”
As it turns out, Lipslicks is a line of lip gloss made by Cover Girl, which has signed an unusual marketing partnership with Running Press, the unit of Perseus Books Group that is publishing the novel.
Cover Girl, which is owned by the consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, has neither paid the publisher nor the book’s authors, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, for the privilege of having their makeup showcased in the novel. But Procter will promote the book on Beinggirl.com, a Web site directed at adolescent girls that has games, advice on handling puberty and, yes, makeup tips.

Apparently they decided against a similar mention of Tampax, for which we can probably all be grateful.
We’re used to blatant product placement in films and on TV, but in kid lit?
It’s an extraordinary development, although I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised. Thin edge. Wedge. Shoulda seen that coming.
But surely as authors for children we have a particular duty of care to ensure authenticity, transparency – not to mention reader credibility. Surely we ought to be on the side, as Maxwell Smart would say, of the forces of goodness and niceness?
Or am I just bitter because you can’t do product placement in historical fiction?
“She grabbed her Wilkinson Sword replica chromed cutlass and shoved it into the Tiffany scabbard that hung from her stylish-yet-practical DKNY belt.”
Maybe I should try chick lit instead?

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
– Henry Ward Beecher

Oh, I’ve clearly always been on the cutting edge of style.
Decorating With Books, by Marie Proeller Hueston, contributing editor at Country Living magazine, is reviewed today at Publishers’ Weekly: it “demonstrates how a display or library of books can enhance the look of almost every room in your home … and add color and texture to a space.”
Hueston encourages readers to keep books “stacked on an ottoman, piled on the floor, lined up on a bench, or … draped over a ladder,” in addition to keeping books “confined to shelves and tabletops …”
You see? It’s not an obsession, or even absent-mindedness – it’s style.
The review goes on to discuss Hueston’s methods of “judging books by their covers, as it were – as objet d’art, without regard to content.”
How fabulous.
I might spend the next week rearranging the house. I see the error of my ways. Rather than organise books by genre and then alphabetically, I should have them sorted by colour.
(Yes, you may sneer, I hear you say, but you’d love that book and will snap it up at the next Dymock’s sale.)

The NZ Woman’s Weekly has ten copies of Ocean Without End to giveaway.
Competition is open to NZ residents – get your entry in before 24 June.