Mark your calendar. The week of September 24 - October 1 is Banned Books Week.

For the unfamiliar, ALA's annual Banned Books Week may seem a cruel temptation for the bibliophile. Not to fret. In reality, it is a highly coordinated marketing campaign replete with t-shirts, posters, bookmarks and $35 promotion kits for some of the most widely held books in American libraries. Most of which lean conspicuously to the left.

So how does one read a banned book? Visit a local library. Here, according to ALA, are the most frequently challenged books of 2004 and their total library holdings as indicated in WorldCat.

Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2004 and their WorldCat holdings:

• The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier - 3778
• Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers - 2635
• Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellesiles - 2203
• Captain Underpants series by Dave Pilkey - 8418
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - 1209
• What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones - 1611
• In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak - 3307
• King & King" by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland - 616
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - 8665
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - 10000+

Now a list of ten books with a conservative twist and their holdings. The methodology for selection? A potpourri of various and sundry personal favorites. These are also titles and authors that would likely be recognized by most lay readers. My point?

Characterizing a book as "banned" or "challenged" has absolutely no correlation to accessibility. The only way to effectively approach successful banning of a book is to collectively refuse its purchase. (The preferred method, I contend, for many of my liberal librarian colleagues.) Thus banning is a matter of degree discerned only by library holdings.

Random Conservative Titles and their WorldCat holdings:

• Best of Burke by Edmund Burke - 542
• The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 by George Nash -1571
• Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan - 1631
• Feminist Fantasies by Phyllis Schlafly - 589
• God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr. - 1644
• Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver - 1322
• The Origin of Species Revisited by Wendell Bird - 574
• The Political Writings of St. Augustine by St. Augustine - 557
• The Quotable Conservative by Rod Evans -124
• What Color is a Conservative? by J.C. Watts - 785

Working from the Captain Underpants theme, a gentle bit of advice to any critics. Don't get your britches in a bunch. There's nothing necessarily scientific here. Only the reality that there is more to banned books than what misses, or better meets, the eye.