Happy First Amendment Day!  Today, UNC is offering readings from a variety of original editions of banned and censored books as part of their third annual First Amendment Day Celebrations.  The objective of the day is to celebrate the First Amendment and explore its impact on the lives of students.

“First Amendment Day: Banned and in the Rare Book Collection” will commence with an exhibit of rare banned books at 5pm in the main lobby of the Wilson Special Collections Library and will be followed by readings in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room.  Readings will begin at 5:30pm and will include excerpts from the following works:

• The 1922 Egoist Press edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with annotations by attorney and UNC alumnus Mangum Weeks about the inability of the book to travel through the U.S. Postal Service;
• Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass;
• The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was banned in the former Soviet Union;
• The censored biography of Thomas Becket from a 1503 edition of The Golden Legend;
• An entry from Diderot and D’Alembert’s eighteenth-century publishing landmark, the Encyclopédie.