Before I get too caught up in 31 Days of Horror, I wanted to make an addendum to this post I had last week: Getting Ready For Banned Books Week.

If I have not made it clear to you already (and I think I have)-- all library workers should be speeding next week focused on ACTION STEPS. As I said in that post:

Banned Books Week is coming October 5-11, 2025. Now is the time to prepare. Well, every day is the time to prepare because those who want to limit intellectual freedom are busy every single day.

But Banned Books Week is the one week of the year where all media outlets will be paying attention. There will be a blitz everywhere and your patrons will be hearing and reading about it. They will have questions and most will want to help us in our fight. 

Kelly Jensen who I mention in that post, put out the latest issue of her newsletter and in it she has an easy and IMPORTANT action step every single one of you can do. She did the work for you and it is FREE. Here is the information from her newsletter:

My (awesome) independent bookstore reached out to me after reading that piece. We have an excellent relationship, and they wanted to know what they could do to better encourage our community to stay on top of what’s going on and be actively involved in pushing back against censorship. We met and built upon something they were already doing: making Banned Books Week about giving banned books back to schools in the community.

This year, I asked if they’d be interested in something else. They already have programming planned around the week to continue raising awareness of what’s really happening, so I thought: what would be an easy way to get some important information across without having to do anything particularly time- or effort- consuming.

The answer was a straightforward and straight-to-the-point bookmark outlining what the average person can do in their own town to protect the right to read.

Click here for the free download

These bookmarks aren’t meant to be sexy. They’re intended to make acting on behalf of intellectual freedom easy and practical to the average person. These are bookmarks you can print out on whatever paper you’d like and slip inside a bookmark holder at an institution where you might work or that you can hand out wherever it may be appropriate. Making a banned books display in your classroom or library? Print some of these out, too.

There’s no authorship on the bookmarks and that’s intentional–Literary Activism gets noted at the bottom for the practical purpose of keeping tabs on the news in book censorship, but otherwise, the point here is to simply spread the word and spread it far. This isn’t about marketing or ties to a specific institution or organization. It’s about meeting the average reader right where they are.

You won’t want to print from the above image. It won’t come out at the right dimensions. Instead, you can download the file from Google Drive.

Click through to read the entire newsletter because there is a lot of useful info there, but I wanted to make sure that the bookmarks and the link to download them were front and center here.

Print these and hand them out, but not just next week...ALL YEAR LONG. The library should be a place for intellectual freedom advocacy all year long. Jensen has made it easy for you to print and stock these bookmarks always. And get them into your online spaces so your supporters have access to them as well.

Just do more than make a display. Act. Speak out. Get your supporters engaged. We are past the time to do something but that doesn't;t mean we should give up.

Thanks again to Jensen for making these bookmarks.