Author Description

Book collector and scholar Dr Geoffrey Cains wrote this groundbreaking bibliography of suppressed Australian books after frequently reading in rare book catalogues that certain books were suppressed. This word raised several questions: What lay behind the suppression? Who instigated it? And who benefitted from it? Over a period of thirty years, he sought out these books, delving into the circumstances of their suppression and collecting 184 that had a credible and interesting back story. Until Access Denied, there has not been a bibliography or even a listing of these works. They do not have catalogue entries in any of the state libraries in Australia. Indeed, there appears to be no international database of suppressed books in existence. Certainly, censored books are listed and have bibliographies devoted to them, but censorship is a state based and politically driven action that, when modified by changing community standards and mores, may be relaxed over time. In contrast, suppression seeks to permanently remove a book from access by the average reader. Access Denied is the story of these near-invisible books.