When I was a kid, I heard about a person from Ottumwa who stole approximately $20 million worth of books from public libraries. I thought that kind of life of crime would be noble and exciting.

In my fantasy world, I thought about the glamorous life of a person dressed in a black body suit and ski mask rappelling from the ceiling of a library. She would tip- toe around the cases of books, pass the sleeping security guard and enter a room where the beloved first edition of some outrageously old book would be held under glass.

The thief would look with pity at the pages that were trapped under glass before disarming the laser beams and lifting the glass. An unseen alarm would set off loud sirens through out the library to wake the sleeping guard. The book thief would then dash back to her rappel line in time to escape the guard with her beloved book in tow and return to her penthouse apartment to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

In truth, I have one true passion. I work to get money to buy books. I go to school in order to get a better job in order to buy more books. People who have this kind of obsession are called bibliophiles. The dictionary translation states that these people are lovers of books, but other Web sites describe a true bibliophile as one who collects books for the sheer pleasure of owning books. They may have several copies of the same book and are reluctant to loan out anything from their collection. These are the people who get pissy about dog-eared pages and bent covers.

I think I fell in love when I was a little kid and found stories of places and people that took away the isolation of rural Iowa life. I wanted to spend time alone with my imagination being fed by these splendid stories about different places I wanted to travel to. Books were my ultimate escape, and, to this day, my savior from other times of isolation.

Book thieves work out of a love for books while those who work to censor books seek only to destroy the communicative ability a well- written book has to offer. Obscenity and vulgar language are the most common excuses people use to censor books. I want to know what kind of a moral scale many book censors are working on and what authority they feel they are entitled to act upon. Hitler and the Taliban censored books and literature as a way of controlling the populace. Book burnings are a clear sign of a government gone awry.

I got involved in the American Civil Liberties Union initially because I wanted to protect books from censorship. I wanted to ensure that other people could read whatever they wanted and prevent people from telling others what was “good” and what was “bad.”

This week is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, and I wanted to thank every librarian for all the wonderful work they do to protect the right to read.

They have fought all the way to the Supreme Court to protect not just books, but online literature as well to ensure that no one person is allowed to dictate “right” from “wrong.” The protection of books may very well protect people from government censorship of our thoughts.

The image of a book thief dressed in a black body suit may be provocative; in truth, the people I worry about stealing my books look more like frumpy housewives and overly zealous moralists. The people kicking their asses are little old ladies behind the reference desk.