I'M ALL FOR BURNING BOOKS (AND SO ARE YOU)

You read that right. I’m all for burning books, as I'm pretty sure you are. Just because you can conjure a pithy line you heard in a film or picked up from someone on social media about democracy or free expression doesn’t make the sentiment true. Yes, there was most certainly a time when books were precious items and libraries temples celebrating and preserving the world’s culture and collective wisdom. And, yes, in that context destroying a book or a library, god forbid, could easily be interpreted as a truly evil act. Agreed. But that’s not the world we live in and it hasn’t been for a long time.

More than that, what's abhorrent about the book burning examples we typically reference is less the destruction of those texts than the targeting and removal of specific voices from society. And far worse still than an example in which burned books were available, read, and beloved for a century would be a state in which certain people (particularly if selected solely on the basis of their faith or immutable characteristics) have their works censored from the start or are never permitted to be published in the first place. To me, all that seems obvious.

THE PAST

As you know, illiteracy was the dominant state for virtually all of human history. Though there's as much variation as possible, with many places achieving full literacy and many having very little, a huge jump in literacy that only just occurred, between the 1960s and '80s, resulted in the ability to read becoming the norm. So only in recent times has any publication even been able to be read by anyone but a tiny local minority. Still, as long as writing has existed we've been destroying it, with many examples of deliberate libricide across cultures and throughout time.

However, the quintessential book burning episode everyone conjures to mind are those carried out by Nazi-dominated student groups and the professors who supported them. In the Spring of 1933, the National Socialist German Students’ Association (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), in collaboration with their professors who helped generate and disseminate blacklists of degenerate works, set out to have a nationwide orgy of cultural purification: a cleansing by fire to rid the nation of publications deemed “un-German” — particularly books by Left-leaning authors or anyone of Jewish ancestry. Universities across 34 towns and cities saw book bonfire celebrations accompanied by ceremonial speeches, pledges, chants, and songs, some of which were broadcast to the wider public via radio. And in just a few months, many works, maybe 90,000 volumes, were purged from book shops, private collections, and public libraries across the nation and set alight. Amazingly, among the works cleansed from German society were the writings of German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. In his play Almansor, written a century prior, Heine had offered the warning: "Where you burn books, you will end up burning people." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.") This one work, with its prophetic message, is what is best known and often amounts to the whole of the story typically told about the '33 conflagration.

What’s less well-known is that Heine’s play was a tragic love story between an Arab man and a Moroccan woman forced to convert from Islam to Christianity, with a depiction of a Qur’an burning which compels the famous line. Discussed even less often than this is the context within which Heine was writing. His birthplace, Düsseldorf, had been occupied by France for his entire life. And at that time, under French administration and its Napoleonic Code, along with many revolutionary ideals such as liberty and equality, Jews had been permitted to attend university and take up disciplines such as medicine and law. However, with the German nationalist’s victory over Napoleonic France and the region’s annexation by Prussia in 1815, Jews were suddenly forced to choose between their faith and their livelihood: either convert to Christianity and keep their profession or maintain their faith and lose whatever position they held in society. At that same time, German student fraternities, with academic backing, organized to persuade their universities to forbid admission to “foreign” (understood to mean French or Jewish) students. Oh, and as would happen a century later, they also engaged in the celebratory burning of books and other works deemed antagonistic to German unity. Of those events, Heine later wrote:

At the Wartburg there ruled a kind of narrow Teutonomania, which whined much about love and belief, but whose love was nothing other than the hatred of the foreign and whose belief consisted solely of irrationality, and which, in its ignorance, knew of nothing better to do than burn books.

So, the 1930s was far less unusual than it might seem, given that even Germany’s special brand of nationalism and anti-Semitism was not novel and folks thinking like this had a relationship with book burning going back long before the Nazis arrived on the scene. Too, just as today, the students and their scholarly mentors, possessed by ideology and notions of purity, have a very long history of being completely and utterly wrong in their passions, motivations, aims, and actions.

IS THAT WHERE WE'RE AT?

What makes our own time different, clearly, is not the absence of rampant anti-Semitism, of course, but the astonishing proliferation and devaluation of writing and publishing. In any previous time, most published works contained in any home or library were relatively rare and expensive items, and likely published sometime in the previous century (just like the works of Heine, from 1820 and torched in 1933.) Those works, even the most popular and abundant of them, were rare on a variety of fronts. Compared to today (with no “publish or perish” or “$0.05 per word”, no mass production or word processing, no copy-and-paste and no LLMs, or anything of the sort), the most fecund of the most prodigious authors of the past typically produced relatively little work in their lifetimes. (I was surprised to find that all the writings, publications and private correspondences, of the father of science and modern philosophy, René Descartes, a man who devoted his life to writing and publishing and who lived into his fifties, could be read in a weekend.) Even then, few printings were made of these works, limited foreign and illicit reproduction occurred, they were seldom made available in many languages, and all copies of a work may have been held in a single location, region, or nation. This meant almost all texts were, by definition, far more scarce (and thus valuable and occasionally treasured) than virtually anything published today, the dullest and most irrelevant of which are preserved physically and electronically and distributed globally through various media (even changing media, from text to speech while at the same time converting language, say) and, of course, all of that at little to no cost and with perfect ease.

On this note, just consider the loss of the Aztec codices, destroyed by Cortes and his conquistadores in the 16th century and the Catholic priests who followed them. Every one of those were truly unique pictorial works, hand-painted manuscripts composed on fig-bark or stretched deerskins and said to have dealt with everything from geography to genealogy and sacred ritual. All appear to have been singular productions. All are lost forever. And forever, as such, our understanding of Aztec culture is so profoundly diminished. Of course the Aztec were all about destroying texts and themselves (seeking to erase the past and depict themselves as the rightful rulers), alas, eliminated many Maya and Mixtec codices significantly predating Aztec arrival... Tragedy. Now contrast that with the loss resulting from the elimination of most of the books in all the libraries in your own town or region, Edmonton or Alberta (Sapporo or Hokkaido), say. Most of those works would be common texts found all around the world. And it's likely nearly everything important or rare has been preserved digitally or had many copies made and could be replaced in physical form in 48hrs or less and with little cost or effort if folks were determined to do so. And, even if all was truly lost, many other places hold significant repositories (people and texts) of everything Albertan. No one would have any reason to doubt that centuries from now anyone who wished to do so could gain an intimate understanding of the Calgary Stampede or the abomination that is the Tar Sands or the best examples of Alberta's contributions to poetry and song. Right. So, as ever, context matters and the past (surprise!) is not the present.

THE STATE OF THE CRAFT

In prior centuries, a big part of the cost and challenge of reliably producing and reproducing texts, even long after the invention of the press and movable type, was actually the paper. For millennia, paper was commonly produced from pulped cotton, linen, or other plant fibres, and in more recent centuries often by recycling old cotton and linen rags (which were in short supply and thus came at high cost.) Charles Fenerty, a poet, logger, and inventor from Nova Scotia, was the first to pulp wood, bleach it, and give us what we think of as modern paper. However, and even though he did not patent his invention, it took decades to popularize this novel product; so not until the 1870s, and only first in the form of newspapers, did the public really begin getting their hands on this far more abundant and cheaper writing and publishing material. And it wasn’t until the 1930s and the Great Depression that book publishers in North America adopted a clever sales gimmick: allowing booksellers to get a refund from publishers for unsold books. This combination of wood-based paper and the returning of unsold books was what led us to the revolution of modern publishing. And, let there be no doubt, that was a real catastrophe.

What does modern publishing look like? Well, in the United States alone, countless millions of trees are cut annually to produce many millions of books. And about 40% of those books are never bought but are instead pulled from shelves and dumped, shredded, incinerated, or pulped without ever having been so much as opened. Some genres, however, such as mass-market fiction, can see destruction rates as high as 80-90%. In America alone, that translates to maybe ten million trees cut annually to print books that are never opened, spend some time on a shelf, maybe as little as a few weeks, only to be destroyed. We can imagine the situation in Europe and Asia is roughly analogous. And, sadly, it has been this way for decades.

But don’t be mistaken, books aren’t transformed back into more books, as is commonly suggested (often by librarians, booksellers, and other lovers of books). By 2006, the publishing industry had been under sustained pressure for a generation for such obscene levels of waste. This led to American publishers, probably the worst offenders, being asked to sign the Book Industry Treatise on Responsible Paper Use. At that time Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers, committed to taking the recycled paper content of their books from just 3% to 30% by 2010. Bold. But, as is so common in other industries, they kept adjusting the arrival date rather than ever meeting their pledge. In fact, almost two decades later, the sustainability section of their website cites LEED certification, emissions reductions, sustainable paper sourcing, use of green electricity (whatever that is), and their zero waste pledge — not a word about even a minority of their books being produced out of old, unused texts.

And, in case you’re wondering, all the other major publishers (HarperCollins, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Hachette, Simon & Schuster) are in the same (virgin wood fiber) boat: they pledge to and often do source their pulp from certified sustainable forests and pulp mills. True. Fine. But that’s not recycling. (And, as we’ve learned, recycling is not really a thing anyway, aside from a few specific materials and special cases.) The most substantial numbers I could find suggest that today less than 10% of Hachette’s paper comes from “recycled wood fibers” — which, again, is not recycled books and is rather far from anything like the closed cycle of publishing some enjoy pretending exists.

SAVED?

None of the above speaks to the life of the 60% of books (or fewer) that are bought and do make it into people’s homes. Well, we know some significant amount of those books are never read and just sit on shelves. I would guess books in that category are a far larger proportion of books bought than most folks might assume. It was certainly a surprise to me and something I was unaware of prior to working at a bookstore. Turns out a lot of people buy first editions and subsequent printings of books, with new covers they like or containing new illustrations, or collections of works from authors they enjoy and have already read, with no intention of ever cracking the spine. These are effectively decoration and, I would guess, are many of the books out in the world.

Is there a sadder thing in the world than a book without tea stains or a tear, lacking in dog-eared pages or scribbles in the margins? I imagine it was for these books-as-decoration folks that the sterile, untouched, and unchanging e-book was invented. Bleghk!

Of what remains, those books being bought and actually read, the overwhelming majority are romance, thriller, religious, self-help, and comic books. Given the volume of production within these most popular genres, few tend to stand out as novel or interesting and even very successful examples are forgotten pretty quickly. These are produced at low quality, with great rapidity, and in large numbers for the purpose of mass consumption, not unlike french fries or Oreo cookies. And that’s great. All I’m suggesting is that if nearly all the self-help books and romance novels in Canada, the UK, and Australia were gathered up and burned or pulped into new romance novels and self-help books, even passionate readers of these works would hardly notice or care, such is the state of abundance and easy proliferation we currently live in. (And that's without mentioning the generative AI epoch we've just entered...)

Now take all the above and notice that even modern libraries aren’t the book repositories or sanctuaries we like to think of them as. There, even across many libraries within a district or entire inter-library system, with limited budgets and shelf space, you can find virtually none of the new titles just from the last decade (which amount to many millions in English alone). And each year the books that dominate those libraries' most borrowed lists (the books actually being read, we assume) are not the captivating, innovative, or challenging masterworks or merely those best exemplifying a genre (you know, those anyone would demand be preserved for future generations); instead, they’re likely to be the latest instalment of Diary of a Wimpy Kid or The Baby-sitters Club or whatever John Grisham just put out.

And then the lifespan of those few chosen works, even popular works and even within the library setting (with protective plastic coverings and the ability to know who borrowed them), may be as little as a few months. I’ve heard that the average paperback will survive a run in a library less than a year due to damage, loss, or theft. Those bigger and more robust hard covers may have only twice that lifespan, sadly. Sometimes the figure you hear thrown around is that a typical library book has a lifespan of about 50 borrows. So libraries are far less sacred vaults preserving great works, as they're often framed, and tend to be more like corner stores: providing a small number of only the most sought-after consumables, most of which fit into the cheap and delicious junk-snack category, which folks churn through like wood chippers through book pulp feedstock.

School libraries, with even less funding, are even worse for books than public libraries. And they're even more aggressively engaged in the business of purging and destroying old books. For instance, if you’re middle aged many of the books you had in your classroom or school library were, at best, long ago expunged for being out of date, no longer relevant, or of poor quality. Many of the rest were deemed to be so racist and/or sexist by today’s standards they had to be removed. (And when they haven't been it's a real shock. A decade ago I was teaching in a fourth grade class with an appalling social studies text I was being encouraged to use. Sorry, no. Life's too short for shitty books.) And where did all those purged books go? Were they redistributed to the masses? Sent to book-impoverished corners of the globe? Placed into an archive to be preserved forever? No. They were destroyed. Right. And why was that? Because teachers and librarians inherently despise their own books and culture? Because they were trying to erase the past? No. It was because they realized they could do so much better and terrible books have far less value than the paper they were printed on.

Just to sharpen this point, we might also ask what happened the moment those despised German “firemen”, those vile burners of books, were themselves taken out of power? Just like the earlier Nazi purge of "un-German" works, every effort was made to eliminate all that had been published in the previous decade (but not just books and pamphlets but also all the games and toys and posters and art) that had been brought in to brainwash the youth toward militarism, racism and anti-Semitism, obedience to state authority, and above all love for their führer. All of that was deemed "degenerate" and not what folks wanted for the new Germany. Right. Those were just the latest "un-German" texts needing to be purged from private collections and public libraries, destroyed immediately for the purification of what would be a new and better German civilization. And was that a great shame or a crime against culture or the German people? Was anyone crying about a terrible act of libricide or scholasticide? Did they object, insisting all books are sacred and any desecration a violation against all that is good? Did folks argue that “a book never hurt anyone” or that their removal was a form of censorship beyond the pale? No. Why? Because some books are just chocked full of terrible bullshit and are unworthy of the trees that were cut to print them. Right.

And, if you need more evidence that neither you nor anyone else considers all books sacred, let's get real. We all know that, had the COVID-19 pandemic been just slightly more serious or prolonged at any given point, you would have gladly sacrificed your Harry Potter box set or your cherished Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The only question would have been whether those pages were used for heating, fuel for the stove, to roll a joint, or to wipe your ass. And you would have done so with the confidence that these words have been proliferated throughout the world and to an unbelievable degree, despite the total absence of unique profundity to be found within them — and, of course, with the knowledge that those stupendous numbers of surviving volumes in every corner of the globe (and archived with even greater abundance throughout the cloud) are dwarfed only by the millions upon millions more, of various printings and editions and revisions, that went unsold and unopened and have already been destroyed, just shortly after printing and without having been read.

So:

Read books.

Write books.

Buy, share, and cite any and all good books.

And, for goodness' sake, come join us here in the 21st century.