At the height of the Red Scare, Walden, Thoreau's literary classic documenting his experiment communing with nature, was deemed "downright socialistic"
and banned from American Information Service libraries.

In 2013, Belgian researchers tested some books in the Antwerp Library for microbes. All of the Top 10 most borrowed books, including Fifty Shades of Grey, contained traces of cocaine.

Belgian researchers testing library books for microbes found herpes viruses on Fifty Shades of Grey.

While researching counterfeit books on Amazon in 2019, Times reporter David Streitfeld found a customer whose copy of 1984 had every instance of the word "faces" replaced with "feces".

Fox News kicked off a round of right-wing outrage over CIA complaints about "nonstop PC meetings" under President Barack Obama before realizing that PC stood not for "political correctness" but "principals committee."

The title of Jamie Lee Curtis' children's book "Mommy Got a Selfie Stick" was changed to "Me, Myselfie & I" because people "thought it meant a vibrator!"

Masters and Johnson's first book, Human Sexual Response (1966), prompted so much hate mail that extra secretaries were hired for 18 months just to answer it.

Herman Melville's classic novel Moby-Dick confused English readers because the British edition was missing the final chapter.

Joan Rivers' daughter Melissa recalls being in 4th grade "the first time my mother tucked me in at night and sent me into dreamland by reading aloud from In Cold Blood."

While author Peter Benchley was trying to pick a title for one of his books, his father suggested the title "What's That Noshin' On Ma Leg." Benchley called it "Jaws."