Censorship wears many faces.
It appears in its most recognizable form when individuals or groups in a community succeed in having a book or other material permanently removed from the shelves of a school or public library. Such censorship frequently attracts much media attention and may generate strong outpourings of pro-and anticensorship feeling. Because these overt occurrences of censorship are fortunately not daily events in most locales, it is perhaps easy to believe that, while the threat of external censorship may be omnipresent, its actual manifestation is relatively rare. I would suggest, however, that in some of its other guises, censorship is always with us. Silent censorship by school or library staff members can manifest itself in a number of ways.