I was delighted that so many respected figures stood up for Alex Valla Gera in court. Surely this must lead to both his case and the one against Mark Camileri being dropped. As the sole stockist of the 'special' issue of Realta I have followed this sorry mess from day one with mounting consternation. Lets hope it will end when judgement is delivered in March.
I have been actively anti-censorship all along and as I had access to the department's files I used to list titles that struck me as absurd.
I bought them in UK and submitted them to the Appeals Board when they arrived. Needless to say - all were cleared and could be sold on the local market. I cleared the entire works of Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins - not that they had any literary value - but they were easy to buy and proved my point.
One good example of this was when I had the play 'Exiles' by James Joyce stopped. I submitted it to the Board with a note pointing out it was available all over the Island in 'The Essential James Joyce'.
The first book I had stopped (a Customs Officer would inspect our import invoices & stop anything that sounded dirty) was Kundera's Immortality. When I presented it to him at Lascaris, demanding to know why it had been stopped, he blushed and apologised as he had misread theLiz title as 'Immorality'. James of Sapienza fame had Somerset Maughan's 'Of Human Bondage'
stopped. Unbelievably the Officer thought it was a bondage book. Another friend with a remainder business in Valleta had Sextet stopped. This transpired to be the biographies of six lady Victorian novelists.

Things have improved and I don't think they are checking our invoices any longer but they are now attacking all sorts of other things. One of the books removed from the University Library shelves was part of a large donation of academic books I had made a few years back. 'The Explicit Body in Performance', published by Routledge, covers Theatre/Gender Studies/Popular Culture.

I may be known for my outspokenness but in these situations, words simply fail me.

Liz Groves runs the Island Books store in Mosta. Island Books opens on weekends, public holidays and whenever the hell Liz feels like. Liz also stocks never-ending mugs of tea and menthol cigarettes but only for personal use. She censors them for her customers.