The number of books threatened with removal from library shelves dropped last year to its lowest total on record, with 405 challenges reported to the American Library Association.

Of course, what the ALA tracks are efforts to have books removed from libraries, not successes at keeping those books off the shelf to in the first place. If a school district, for instance, has a policy of never even obtaining certain books, there’s not going to be a fight over banning it.

As writer and artist Brian Bendis notes in a recent interview with comedian Patton Oswalt:

One of my in-laws was in Florida and I was down there and I had a lengthy conversation with the retailer who told me that his favorite comic book was Alias, but that he could not carry it on the shelf because the religious right would shut him down and that they come into the store on a weekly basis just to make sure that his shelves are clean….

[T]o have that conversation is such an eye opener because you can bang your head against the wall like, “Why doesn’t this sell more? Why doesn’t this sell more? Oh, there are whole parts of the country that can’t carry it. That’s a good reason.”

The question, then, is this: are we actually seeing fewer banned books, or simply fewer books that those who would do the banning might find objectionable?