The 9 June 2007 posting on the Kenyon Review's blog had a link to a story in The Seattle Times about a man burning books as a protest. My expectation, while waiting for the computer to load the page, was a story about an overly zealous supporter of some fringe religious or political movement. To my surprise the man turned out to be the owner of a used-book store who was attempting to cull his inventory, and make a statement about "society's diminishing support for the printed word" at the same time. Instead of a wild eyed fanatic throwing the printed poison of Satan (or the Far Left or Far Right or Near Middle) into the cleansing flames, there was a young man tending what appeared to be a few books in an over-sized, concrete Weber grill.
My expectation was based on my, perhaps misguided, presumption that for most Americans book burning is quintessentially evil. It is an act that is so embedded in our psyche as a symbol of tyranny and oppression that many people cannot conceive of ever, for any reason, condoning it. In fact it generates such strong reactions that those of us who make our livings selling books often have a difficult time disposing of unsellable product. I'm not sure that burning a few books was an effective way of protesting our society's disdain of books and reading. We have, in my opinion, been a nation that from our founding idolizes stupidity, and finds intelligence suspicious at best. (My dad once told me, when I was in elementary school, that Adlai Stevenson could not possibly win the presidential election because he was too smart.) I do, however, understand the gentleman's frustration with being unable to rid himself of useless inventory and finally just putting a match to it.
When I was involved in the college textbook business one of the most difficult, if not The Most Difficult, things I had to do was get rid of dead books. Dead books are those books that for one reason or another are not being used by the faculty for their classes anymore, and cannot be returned to the publisher or sold or returned to a wholesale distributor. They might be out of print, or have come out in a new edition, or they might be from a foreign publisher or a small domestic publishing house that does not accept returns. For whatever reason they are books that we could not sell.
Over the years we tried marking them down to 50¢ or $1.00, and they would just sit there semester after semester. Sometimes we would discover a church group that would take the books to give to prisons or distribute overseas, and for a few brief months the stockroom would be clean. After a semester or two the person responsible for organizing the church's committee would move or retire or die and no one else would step forward to take over. I literally spent days trying to find an agency who would take three or ten cartons of books off my hands. The one thing I could never, ever do was throw them away.
If I threw them away it was a certainty that they would be discovered, and before you could change into a clean shirt there would be a picture on the front page of the student paper along with a story on how the bookstore was destroying perfectly good books to drive the price even higher. (I will at some point discuss the cost of textbooks, why they are as expensive as they are and perhaps some ways to make them a bit more affordable, but today is not the day.) College bookstores are generally considered as ethical as an Enron executive, and having a few dozen old texts photographed in a dumpster, no matter how out of date or useless, does nothing to help the image. And if I had burned them? I doubt if I would be here writing rambling little essays that seem to go nowhere.
焚火こうこう燃え立ちて人らだまりたり
The bonfire burns busily; Around it the people are silent.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
At the library where I work people ask me what happens to old books. I used to tell them old books get weeded and sent to the book sale. They ask me what happens if they don't sell. I used to tell them if the books don't sell after a few sale cycles they usually get thrown out. That's when they would look at me like I just told them I ate kittens for lunch. Throw out books?!! That's horrible! No, it's not. Books are physical objects. Like most physical objects they sometimes outlast their usefulness. Then you throw them away. Or recycle them, if you prefer. This is an incredibly difficult concept to get across to many people in the case of books.
ReplyDeleteSo now I tell them weeded books go to a special place we call library heaven. So much better to promote the illusion.