Store owner offers to send free copies of 'Maus' to families in county where it is banned

A bookstore owner is offering to send free copies of "Maus" to families residing in the Tennessee county where the Holocaust-themed graphic novel has been banned.

Ryan Higgins, the owner of the Comics Conspiracy store in Sunnyvale, Calif., announced on Twitter last week that he would donate up to 100 copies of "The Complete Maus" to any family in McMinn County, where a school board voted last month to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning book from an eighth grade language arts curriculum.

"Maus" depicts humans in Third Reich-era Europe as animals, with Jews illustrated as mice and Nazis as cats. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman based the book on his father Vladedk Spiegelman, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The 10-person school school board voted unanimously to remove the book from the curriculum because it includes profanity and a drawing of a naked character.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum and Anti-Defamation League criticized the board's decision, with the museum saying the book "has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors."

Spiegelman said he was "baffled" by the ban on the book.

Demand for the book has skyrocketed since the school board vote, with it rising to Amazon's bestseller list.

Higgins told The Washington Post that reading "Maus" as a teenager "opened my eyes." When he bought his comic book store, he decided that he would always make sure it had copies of "Maus" in stock.

He called the school board's decision "bizarre."

"The actual images of the Holocaust are the most graphic, nightmare-inducing images in the world," Higgings told the Post. "Why take 'Maus' out of the curriculum when it makes this horror more teachable to a wider and younger audience?"

He has offered free copies of other banned books in the past. In December, he wrote on Twitter that he would send a copy of "V is for Vendetta" or "Y: The Last Man Book One" to any students at Leander Independent School District, a suburban district outside of Austin, Texas, where the books had been banned from book clubs and classroom libraries.