When we opened Banned Books & Co in Knivsta, people asked the obvious question: why? Why a bookshop dedicated to literature that has been banned, censored, or suppressed? The short answer is that someone should. The longer answer has to do with what I believe a bookshop can be, and what it means to put certain books on a shelf in a small Swedish town and say, these matter.
There is a strange paradox at the heart of literary censorship. The books that societies have tried hardest to silence are, more often than not, the ones we now consider essential. Galileo's dialogues, once condemned by the Church, form the bedrock of modern science. Novels that were banned for obscenity — from James Joyce to Toni Morrison — are now taught in universities around the world. The pattern is so consistent that it should give us pause whenever someone argues that a particular book is too dangerous to be read. History suggests that the danger usually lies in the opposite direction: in not reading, in not being confronted with ideas that challenge what we take for granted.
Freedom of expression is one of those principles that everyone claims to support in the abstract. But it becomes concrete in specific, sometimes uncomfortable moments. It lives in the decision to stock a book that some people find offensive. It lives in the willingness to let readers encounter ideas that you personally might disagree with. A bookshop that only carries safe, uncontroversial titles is perfectly fine as a business. But it is not making a statement about anything. We wanted Banned Books & Co to be a statement — about the kind of community we want to live in, about the role of literature in a free society, and about the responsibility we have to preserve access to the full range of human thought.
A place for free thinking
There is a connection between the bookshop and education that I think about often. A child who grows up with access to diverse, challenging, even unsettling literature develops something that no curriculum can teach: the capacity to think independently. To encounter an idea, sit with the discomfort it produces, and form a judgment. That capacity is not built by shielding young people from difficult books. It is built by trusting them to engage with the full complexity of the world, with guidance and conversation, but without the presumption that there are ideas too dangerous for them to encounter.
Running a bookshop in a small town is, in many ways, an act of stubborn optimism. You are betting that people want more than convenience, that they are drawn to a place where the selection on the shelves reflects a point of view, where the act of browsing is itself a kind of intellectual adventure. Every book in our shop has a story behind it — not just the story within its pages, but the story of why someone, somewhere, decided it should not be read. That second story is often as illuminating as the first. It tells you something about power, about fear, about the boundaries a society draws around acceptable thought.
I have spent most of my professional life helping organizations work better — more openly, more collaboratively, with greater trust. The bookshop might seem like a departure from that work, but to me it is an extension of it. The same conviction that drives me to help a company become more transparent drives me to put a banned book on a shelf. Both are acts of faith in the idea that people, given access to information and the freedom to think, will generally make good use of it. That faith is not naive. It is the most practical foundation I know for building anything worth building.