Reading the Reasons

Purple Room – Powell’s City of Books
Downtown Portland, Oregon
Saturday, June 28, 2026 | 10am

A week after photographing Powell’s banned books display in its Blue Room, I found myself standing in front of it again.

This time, I walked around it.

What I had first assumed was a single bookshelf unfolded into a much larger installation.

More titles filled the opposite side. Beneath nearly every book was a handwritten card—not summarizing the story, but explaining why someone had attempted to remove it from a library, classroom, or school district.

Walking around the display, I stopped reading book titles and started reading the handwritten cards.

Each one explained why a particular work had been challenged. Some reasons were familiar. Others were surprising. The card beneath Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl described decades of challenges over passages about adolescence—and even quoted a committee member who reportedly dismissed the diary as “a real downer.”

It wasn’t the only unexpected explanation on the shelf.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had been challenged for language and depictions of sexual violence.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was described by critics as “biased” and “un-American.”

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks had been challenged as “pornographic” and for containing graphic medical information.

The books themselves were familiar.

The handwritten explanations transformed the display.

For a moment, Powell’s no longer felt like a bookstore. It felt like a museum gallery.

Museums place artifacts beside interpretive labels to provide historical context. Powell’s had done something remarkably similar. The books became the artifacts. The handwritten cards became the exhibit labels. Together, they invited visitors to consider not only what each book contained, but why someone, somewhere, believed it should disappear from public shelves.

Near the display sat another recommendation: How to Defend Books and Why by Danny Caine, described by the staff as “a perfect companion to any book on this shelf.”

It wasn’t there to tell visitors what to think.

It was there to continue the conversation.

As I photographed the display from different angles, I realized I wasn’t documenting individual books. I was documenting an act of curation—a bookstore choosing to preserve the history surrounding these works as carefully as the works themselves.

Bookstores and museums serve different purposes.

Yet, standing in Powell’s Purple Room, surrounded by books on history, politics, and human rights, the distinction briefly felt smaller than I expected.

Sometimes the story isn’t only inside the book.

Sometimes it’s written on the card beneath it.