A Fire-Proof Copy of Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid’s Tale' Raises $130K USD
To help against book bans.
In honor of helping against the banning of books in U.S. schools, Margaret Atwood and Penguin Random House teamed up to create an unburnable copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. As a result, the one-of-a-kind book was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $130,000 USD, which will go to PEN America, an organization that advocates for freedom of expression.
PEN America has previously reported bans across 26 states, which consisted of 1,586 bans on individual books in 86 school districts.
“The Handmaid’s Tale has been banned many times — sometimes by whole countries, such as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists, sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries,” Atwood said in a statement. “Let’s hope we don’t reach the stage of wholesale book burnings, as in Fahrenheit 451. But if we do, let’s hope some books will prove unburnable — that they will travel underground, as prohibited books did in the Soviet Union.”
A video posted by Penguin Random House shows Atwood putting the fire-proof copy of her dystopian novel to the test. “Powerful words can never be extinguished,” reads the text in the clip.
Watch Atwood in action above and learn more about the fire-proof book here.
