Back in the days before Google, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Noah built a boat when we had all that rain, I spent many, many hours in my university library. One day, I noticed a sign neatly taped to the wall. It contained a very polite request:

“PLEASE DO NOT CUT ARTICLES OUT OF JOURNALS. PLEASE PHOTOCOPY THEM.”

Until that moment, the idea of wandering around with a pair of scissors in my hand and a maniacal gleam in my eye, intent upon performing secret surgery on The Lancet had never crossed my mind. Yet, the moment I saw that sign, I was filled with an almost overwhelming desire to hack out articles. Not because I had any particular interest in them, but because I’d been told not to.

This, I think, is the human condition in one anecdote. Tell us no, and we’ll immediately sharpen the scissors.

This is exactly why banning books is the intellectual equivalent of labelling them with a neon sign that says “Don’t read this under any circumstances”. And this, as we know, translates to “Read me immediately, preferably under the covers with a torch while pretending to be asleep.” Yet people continue to ban them on a small scale in individual libraries, all the way to bans that span entire countries.

Nothing is more tantalising than forbidden words. How many times have you crouched behind the office fern, pretending to tie your shoelace, just so that you can finish eavesdropping on a conversation you’ve overheard?

Every tyrant and despot in history is terrified by books. Hitler burned them and Stalin imprisoned their authors. Books are sneaky things. They slip into your imagination and plant troublesome questions. This makes them dangerous – not knives and explosives dangerous (though a copy of War and Peace could be deadly if you threw it hard enough) but because as the questions leak into people’s brains, they start to multiply. Then, suddenly, people start saying things like “I don’t think I agree with you.” Dictators hate that. It gives them a rash.

The delicious irony, of course, is that banning a book is the best marketing strategy possible. Honestly, banning a book guarantees its immortality. Left alone, it would probably gather dust at the back of a library shelf. By banning it, you are likely to have created a best seller.

Here’s my point, though. Rebellion doesn’t have to mean marching up and down the street with signs or chaining yourself to a tree. Sometimes, it’s just thinking through things to see why people are so threatened by the ideas in books. In a world where we are drip-fed bite-sized ideas on social media that are preapproved by an algorithm (or by an insecure politician), choosing to think for yourself is a radical act. Reading books is rebellion in its most civilised form. You can just sit quietly and turn the pages until your brain bursts out of the cages constructed by society.

Read everything you can – banned or otherwise. You’ll disagree with some of it, and that’s fine, too. The very act of reading them is saying that your mind cannot be tamed.

And, if you do decide to creep into the library at night armed with scissors, at least be dignified about it. None of this crouching behind periodicals nonsense. Announce yourself loudly in the reference section and then run like mad before security arrives.