Unburnable copy of The Handmaid’s Tale goes on auction to protest book bans
By Daniel Roman
Over the past few years, banning books has been gaining popularity across the United States. From books about controversial topics to those that merely feature LGBTQIA+ characters, some state legislators have decided that people need to be shielded from stories about worlds where books are burned, women don’t have the right to control their bodies, or gay people exist. It’s gotten to the point where last month a Tennessee lawmaker openly suggested burning banned books, which sounds like an idea right out of a dystopian science fiction novel. Clearly someone skipped class the day they read Fahrenheit 451.
For some authors, the threat of having their books banned or burned is such old news that they don’t bat an eye. Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale — about a dystopian future where the government subjugates women to help deal with an infertility crisis — first released in the United States in 1985, and since then it’s been banned in various countries around the world. So it should come as no surprise that the 82-year-old author ain’t scurred of the current book banning craze in the U.S., and is auctioning off a special “unburnable” edition of The Handmaid’s Tale to raise money for fighting back against these types of archaic censorship measures.
Margaret Atwood tries to burn The Handmaid’s Tale with a flamethrower
The “unburnable book” edition of The Handmaid’s Tale is so resilient that Atwood and publisher Penguin Random House announced the auction with a video where the author tries to destroy the book with a literal flamethrower. It’s printed on fire-resistant paper and bound with a flame retardant cover, which is enough that it can withstand Atwood’s flamethrower and presumably anything else that information-averse politicians can throw at it.
“Across the United States and around the world, books are being challenged, banned and even burned. So we created a special edition of a book that’s been challenged and banned for decades,” said Penguin Random House in a statement. The publisher puts forth that this special version of the book was “designed to protect this vital story and stand as a powerful symbol against censorship.”
Per PEOPLE, Atwood shared her own statement. “I never thought I’d be trying to burn one of my own books… and failing,” she said. “The Handmaid’s Tale has been banned many times—sometimes by whole countries, such as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists, sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries. Let’s hope we don’t reach the stage of wholesale book burnings, as in Fahrenheit 451. But if we do, let’s hope some books will prove unburnable—that they will travel underground, as prohibited books did in the Soviet Union.”
The fireproof edition of The Handmaid’s Tale is being auctioned off by Sotheby’s in New York, with the bid currently at $70,000. All proceeds from the sale of “The Unburnable Book” will go to PEN America, an organization fighting literary censorship.
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