KNOW YOUR NUMBER

KNOW YOUR NUMBER is a book by RICHARD SELBY. The Texas prison-ban record treats the book as excluded reading inside state custody, which shows how prison and mailroom censorship function as a government reading regime.

What makes it interesting is the prison-censorship logic: officials treat the book as a practical threat model and collapse the distinction between reading about something and doing it. As a book, it can be read not only for subject matter but for the way form, tone, and circulation make a text feel dangerous, intimate, or politically usable to anxious officials.

It also matters as part of a wider censorship history in Texas. The present page is a dossier starter built from source-tracked ban records; the surviving note currently says: The Texas prison-ban record treats the book as excluded reading inside state custody, which shows how prison and mailroom censorship function as a government reading regime. The exported reason says: PAGES 9 & 17 SEI More publication history, translations, and close reading can be added later.

KNOW YOUR NUMBER entered censorship debates as a book associated with circulation politics, institutional control, and risk knowledge. In the current dossier, the main state objections cluster around instructional harm and public order.

The earliest event currently captured here is 2009-11-02 in Texas, where Texas corrections agencies and prison mailrooms excluded from prison circulation. The Texas prison-ban record treats the book as excluded reading inside state custody, which shows how prison and mailroom censorship function as a government reading regime. The exported reason says: PAGES 9 & 17 SEI The Texas prison-ban record treats the book as excluded reading inside state custody, which shows how prison and mailroom censorship function as a government reading regime. The exported reason says: PAGES 9 & 17 SEI

This entry is still incomplete: more jurisdictions, court orders, and translated justifications should be added over time.

This page is intentionally incomplete. The ban history is a starter dataset, not a final census of every jurisdiction or decree.

• 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova

  A compact reference on how censorship systems moved across states, churches, and courts.

• Banned Books: 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. Anne Lyon Haight

  Useful for comparing older obscenity, heresy, and political bans with modern free-speech disputes.

• The Marshall Project: Banned book lists from 18 states database partial
• Wikipedia REST summary API database partial
• 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature book partial
• Banned Books: 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. book partial