Asheville bookseller ships out 22,000 books previously removed from DCPS shelves

A North Carolina bookseller said it was shocked when a contractor contacted them about shipping them thousands of books that were removed from Duval County Public School shelves.

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If the bookshop didn’t take the books, the contractor said they would be destroyed. Firestorm is now in the process of raising money to ship the books back to Florida students for free.

“It’s an enormous quantity of books, nearly three times the number we keep on our shelves,” a representative told Action News Jax. “We seriously questioned whether or not we could even handle this, but when we heard the books were at risk of being destroyed, we were shocked and knew we had to act.”

RELATED: Students’ rights organizations holding book ban protest outside DCPS headquarters

The bookshop said there a total of 22,500 books that were dropped off in November 2022 including 45 different book titles including “The Life of Rosa Parks” by Kathleen Connors, “The Double Life of Pocahontas” by Jean Fritz, and “Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968″ by Alice Duncan.

Firestorm has since started the initiative “Banned Books Back!” and is working to ship up to six books for each request for free with a focus on Florida at first.

A representative said they received 260 requests so far with about 30% from Duval. The initiative has received nearly $20,000 in donations to cover shipping costs.

A representative for DCPS said the book titles were returned to the publisher for credit towards the purchase of new titles. But our questions about what happened to the books after were instead directed to the publisher.

DCPS outlines its process for reviewing books on its website linked HERE.

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