Burning Books

I have 350,000 books...

2011-07-01T13:15:00.005+10:00

Shaunna Raycraft, from Pike Lake, Saskatchewan, stepped in when her widowed neighbour began to burn her husband's collection of books. "There was a house floor-to-ceiling with books. He was the collector; she had tried to get someone to appraise the books but they wouldn't come out [to the rural setting]. She didn't know how to deal with them so she started to burn them," Raycraft told Canadian national broadcaster CBC.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/09/house-collapsing-weight-books

Pensioners burn encyclopedias

2011-06-23T16:22:00.001+10:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/jan/06/burning-books-wales

Things are pretty grim in Wales.

In the Adelaide Papers

2010-10-15T09:21:00.003+11:00

FIRED UP: Farmers protesting over the Murray-Darling Basin Plan burn copies of its guide in Griffith yesterday. Picture: GABRIELLE DUNLEVY
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/in-depth/water-report-inflames-farmers/story-e6frebju-1225938897001

1978: "Art in the Age of Capitalism"

2010-10-07T10:55:00.001+11:00

I was recently contacted by Tom McCulloch about a book burning in Mildura (Victoria) in 1978. He tells me that following the Mildura Sculpture Triennial of that year he had an Exhibition Exposition printed which included illustrations of Nick Spill’s photo “Art in the Hands of Capitalism”, which was apparently the trigger for the City Council to declare the book in breach of its ban on ‘nudity, pornography, obscenity and blood-letting’ in the Triennial. Tom says that the photo shows Nick and his girlfriend simulating sex in a rather satirical, humorous way.’

‘Much more scandalous,’ Tom continues, ‘was the Book’s inclusion of letters to the Council from artist Peter Tyndall, in which he put some logical questions about the Council’s right to ban artists from experimenting with boundaries, etc.’ The incident was widely reported in 1978 and the visiting German artist Klaus Rinke later made this burning part of his exhibit at the Art Gallery of NSW in the Biennale of Sydney.

Recently some facsimile copies were made and sold at the Mildura Arts Centre, and Tom also spoke at a recent symposium in Mildura, where his paper was received enthusiastically; the remaining copies of the reproduced book sold out at the coffee break.

http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues11to20/tieup.htm

Lord Gardenstone: This wreck was easy in a stupid age.

2010-10-05T10:22:00.004+11:00

Lord Gardenstone (1721-1793) was a distinguished judge, bon vivant and a wonderful eccentric noted for his fondness for pigs: he was ‘distinguished for his conviviality, at a period when, especially in Scotland, it must be admitted that real proficiency was requisite to procure fame in that qualification’ (Robert Chambers, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, 1835).

He also found time to be an occasional writer, and his Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1792) is a charming selection of some of his pensées and poems, which unsurprisingly includes a rollicking ode ‘On Hard Drinking.' The same collection also includes the following poem 'On the Loss of Ancient Literature':

Stephen King: Firestarter

2009-09-18T11:08:00.002+10:00

Coming up for auction at Bonhams in the US in the next few weeks is this rare limited edition copy of Stephen King's Firestarter, the novel perhaps more famous as the vehicle for a young Drew Barrymore -- she plays Charlie McGee, on the run from the government with her father, because of her powers of "pyrokinesis". This ability to set things alight by staring long and hard at them leads to all sort of moments of high cinema, including her chance to utter the immortal line "Get out of here, you bastard, I'll burn you up! I'll fry you!"

The original novel by King was released in this limited edition of 26 copies, bound in aluminium-coated asbestos cloth. Known as the "Asbestos Firestarter", it was produced in honour of the earlier asbestos-bound limited edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Burning Bookmark: now only $3

2009-09-17T10:14:00.006+10:00

Now available via the internet: the burning bookmark.

The copy-writers have had a field day with this one: "Are you diving into a smoldering novel? Browsing through some incendiary literature? Give the book-burning-bunch something to get hot about with this flaming placeholder. Wedge it snugly between the pages of your favorite edition of “Fahrenheit 451” and let this stylized flame show you quickly to your saved spot. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them!"

http://www.perpetualkid.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=3138

Books as Decoration?

2009-08-26T08:47:00.003+10:00

This seems almost too wonderful to be true, but a woman on the interweb is encouraging people to jazz up their family snaps by collaging them onto a background of ripped up books, in this case a thesaurus that was asking for it. Wonderful.

http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/08/diy-project-kat-geigers-modern-family-photos.html/july-2009-011

Books as decoration: Vinothek

2009-07-15T22:10:00.004+10:00

Hip new wine bar in Crown Street in Sydney shows that print is mostly dead. Some used book dealer is on to a good thing.

http://www.vinothek.com.au/

On Papetoai

2009-07-07T15:00:00.001+10:00

‘In one of the visits which Mr. Nott made to the residence of Taaroarii, for the purpose of preaching to his people, he was followed by Patii, the priest of the temple in Papetoai, the district in which the missionaries resided. This individual appeared to listen most attentively to what was said; and after the conclusion of the service, he and Mr. Nott proceeded together along the beach towards the settlement.As they walked, Patii fully disclosed the feelings of his mind to Mr. Nott, and assured him that on the morrow, at a certain hour, he would bring out the idols under his care, and publicly burn them. […]
Patii, however, was punctual to his word. He, with his friends, had collected a quantity of fuel near the sea-beach; and, in the afternoon, the wood was split, and piled on a point of land in the western part of Papetoai, near the large national Marae, or temple, in which he had officiated. […]
A short time before sun-set, Patii appeared, and ordered his attendants to apply fire to the pile. This being done, he hastened to the sacred depository of the gods… When he approached the burning pile, he laid them down on the ground. They were small carved wooden images, rude imitations of the human figure; or shapeless logs of wood, covered with finely braided and curiously wrought cinet of cocoa-nut fibres, and ornamented with red feathers. […]
Patii tore off the sacred cloth in which they were enveloped, to be safe from the gaze of vulgar eyes; stripped them of their ornaments, which he cast into the fire; and then one by one threw the idols themselves into the crackling flames – sometimes pronouncing the name and pedigree of the idol, and expressing his own regret at having worshipped it – at others, calling upon the spectators to behold their inability even to help themselves. Thus were the idols which Patii, who was a powerful priest in Eimeo, had worshipped, publicly destroyed.’

Reverend William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands (London, 1829)

On Raiatea

2009-07-03T08:59:00.001+10:00

The missionary ‘Papeiha requested the people to attend a general meeting which was to be held on the following morning… At the appointed hour, the whole of the inhabitants of the island assembled, and, after having spoken to them of the immense labour they formerly bestowed in the erection of the maraes, and in the worship of their gods, he exhorted them to let their “strength, devotedness, and steadfastness in the service of the true God, far exceed.” He then made the following two propositions: first, “That all the maraes in the island should be burned, and that all the remaining idols should be brought to him, in order that he might forward them to us at Raiatea, that we, with our people, might also rejoice in the triumphs of the word.” The second proposition was, “That we should commence immediately building a house in which to worship Jehovah.” To both these proposals the assembled multitude yielded their cordial assent. As soon as the meeting broke up, a general conflagration of the maraes took place; and so complete was the destruction, that, on the following morning, not a single idol temple remained unmutilated.’

John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London, 1838)

Books as decoration

2009-05-12T08:45:00.004+10:00

My new hobby is to keep an eye on how books are increasingly being used as decorations. There was a fashion for this in the interwar years, when people took fancy old bindings and made them into cigarette cases, but now people are being much more imaginative. Certainly if the glossy magazines are to be trusted, the only thing books are good for is to hold up shells and small antiques (although I have a sneaking admiration for another design favourite, people who sort their books by the colour of their binding).

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/sf/look/look-counter-made-from-books-083986

Erasing cigarettes

2009-05-07T15:07:00.005+10:00

A friend sent through a link to this recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which is a bit of a stretch, but I think has a natural home here on the blog. Apparently Manly Council has gone around its digital collection of paintings by the smoking enthusiast Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo rubbing out the cigarettes. My hope is that they bring the same zeal to author photos of the same era, and appoint an official to go through the municipal libraries scratching out the offensively dangling Gitanes that have been the preferred prop of the author for generations.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/spot-the-difference-council-sets-off-smoke-alarm/2009/04/22/1240079731177.html

Burn all your books: Voltaire

2009-02-23T21:30:00.000+11:00

Voltaire, who had already had any number of his books burned in Paris, Geneva and Rome, published his Dictionnaire Philosophique in 1764, to the by now typical reaction from authorities. The book was banned and burned, and even owning a copy was considered dangerously close to sedition.

Interestingly, Voltaire is a good example of how common the rhetoric of book burning was in the eighteenth-century. In his entry on “War” in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, he wrote:

“Wretched physicians of souls, you declaim for five quarters of an hour about some pinprick, and you say nothing about the disease that tears us into a thousand pieces! Philosophical moralists, burn all your books. So long as the whim of a few men causes thousands of our brothers to be honourably butchered, the portion of mankind devoted to heroism will be the most frightful thing in the whole of nature.”

Burning Manuscripts: Tom Paulin

2009-01-30T22:15:00.001+11:00

It’s a favourite habit of writers to become nervous about their early writings. I was reading Tom Paulin’s The Invasion Handbook the other day, a work which sent me rummaging around on google, trying to follow some of the more difficult leads. I ended up looking at a few interviews with Paulin, including this one from the Guardian in 2002, in which he alludes to an earlier trip to the incinerator:

‘By the time Paulin left school he knew he wanted to write, and when he went to Hull University to read English in 1967 it was with the express intent of later returning to Belfast for a teaching job that would allow time to write. “But I didn't get anywhere with my writing at Hull,” he explains, and describes his early unpublished work as “inchoate”. He later burnt it all. “Maybe I am not so happy about that now. It was something I did in my 20s. You go through a bad time and think ‘where am I going?’. And I thought I would just clean everything out.”’

Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian 23 March 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/mar/23/poetry.academicexperts

1933: The Nation

2009-01-28T20:12:00.002+11:00

Curiously, although there were many cartoons on the Nazi bookfires in 1933, the majority of them were openly mocking. The Nation, the left-leaning American weekly was no exception, publishing this cartoon by Georges Schreiber in which a group of moustachioed militarists, industrialists and SA men caper about in the nude, looking something like a George Grosz caricature. Hitler looms large over the pyre, holding a copy of the works of de Sade, while on the fire are copies of the Old Testament, the Nation itself, and the writings of Thomas Mann burn (Thomas Mann, of course, was not on the first Nazi blacklists). What the juxtaposition implies, of course, is that the wrong books are being burned, while the decrepit figures suggest the bankruptcy of their ideas.

Burning Books: sport travel and leisure interests

2008-12-12T15:16:00.003+11:00

This is a screen-grab from the Australian site for Palgrave Macmillan. They're good eggs, on the whole, with good ideas, but I confess I'm not sure what to make of the fact that they've listed my book in "sport travel and leisure interests". I picture a chap in a sports coat smoking a pipe. 'Well, yes, I do enjoy a good fire, but it's more of a hobby really...'

Fahrenheit 451 Cake

2008-12-11T08:11:00.005+11:00

The good folk at the Library of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) have recently hosted their third annual Edible Book Festival. Unheralded among the prize-winners (further proof that literary prizes are unreliable, in my opinion) was this entry by Klara Kim. I particularly like the two pocket-books of matches on the back of the truck.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/ediblebooks/2008gallery.html

Ian Morrison (Australian Book Review)

2008-12-09T10:22:00.005+11:00

My thanks to Ian Morrison for his kind comments. Anyone who reads the piece will appreciate the humour of Ian's very droll contributor's note in the issue, which comments simply: 'Ian Morrison works as a librarian. The opinions expressed in this review are not necessarily those of his employer.'

Burning Books: really makes you think

2008-12-06T12:48:00.002+11:00

A while back The Times published a banner piece by Rod Liddle under the line ‘Burning is too good for them’. Liddle is evidently the thinking man’s thinking man, and without much ado launches into his list of books too callow or just stridently awful to be endured. Anthony Powell kicks things off, before Liddle goes further afield, asking some other cultural arbiters for their own favourites: Aphra Behn gets a mention, as well as Salman Rushdie, Alice Walker, Dostoevsky, and Don Quixote.

What is interesting is that the piece finishes on the forlorn note that perhaps such a robust clearing away of the bores and box-tickers might allow some unjustly overlooked books to be reconsidered (Liddle nominates David Storey, Heinrich Böll and Vladimir Voinovich).

Forlorn is right. The piece generated 91 comments online: by my count, 6 upbraided him as a monster for even suggesting a book might be burnt (“Before you go thinking about burning books read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Good book, and really makes you think.”) In fact, only 10 have taken him up on his offer to rehabilitate authors, and then usually only to defend Anthony Powell from his singapore whipping earlier on.

In the end, and excluding a few that might be thought to drift from the topic, the remainder of comments are all red-blooded calls for the bonfire, delivered with varying degrees of wit and coherence. We learn that Ian McEwan appeals to “introverted people”, that Catch 22 has “no real plot and not enough laughs”, that Arundhati Roy should just say that it is raining and then get on with it, and that Stephen King should have given up after his “accident”.

My favourite are two successive remarks by a chap in Hyderabad: the first announces “I am not for burning books. How stupid an author is or a book is pales before the enormity of the stupidity of readers who make it a hit.” This is immediately followed by his nominations: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4170944.ece

These might be the books that Hitler burned

2008-12-05T08:07:00.003+11:00

Nothing warms a publisher's heart faster than the prospect of someone trying to censor one of the books they publish. This advertisement, currently being flogged on eBay, dates from 1965 and sports the wonderful tagline 'These are the Books that Hitler burned'.

Although a few decades had passed, it was still early enough, apparently, to try and move copies of the well-known 'Great Books of the Western World'. One doesn't like to suggest that the publisher's are being deliberately misleading, but it must be said that the long list of authors doesn't appear to include all that many that were blacklisted by the Nazis. Marx and Freud, certainly, and I know that Spinoza was singled out as well. But at a guess, probably not Nietzsche.

Paper Salvage: Germany 1943

2008-11-10T08:43:00.005+11:00

I've not read much about paper shortages in Germany during the Second World War, but there's every reason to expect that the production of paper was a serious concern -- certainly by the end of the war there was a marked deterioration in paper used in cheap publishing, with many books of this period printed on thin, grey, brittle stock. This poster, for a paper salvage drive in April 1943, certainly confirms that it was a serious issue for the Nazi government, and for that matter, that paper drives in all countries were targetted at children. It does seem unusual that the children depicted here are in casual clothes rather than Hitler Youth uniforms. It's also worth pointing out that while newspapers are evidently the main focus, that the likely looking lad in the front does have a book tucked under his arm -- although book pulping represented a significant proportion of paper pulping, it is uncommon to see it directly alluded to in advertising.

Burning of the Library of Algiers

2008-11-04T11:39:00.002+11:00

I was recently contacted by Larry T. Nix, who shared with me a page he has prepared on a selection of philatelic items which commemorate the burning of the Library in Algiers in 1962. The burning was part of a series of attacks made on social and cultural centres in Algeria by the militant OAS as part of their violent resistance to Algerian self rule: the library and the surrounding campus of the University of Algiers were set alight by the detonation of phosphorus bombs in early June 1962.

Although I’ve not seen exact figures, it’s clear that this resulted in serious losses to the Library, and it’s interesting, in this light, that it is the burning of the Library which continues to have the greatest resonance. As Larry’s page shows (http://www.libraryhistorybuff.com/bibliophilately-algiers-library.htm), the burning of the Library has been commemorated across the Middle East, although it is probably fair to say that the attack is not as well known in the West.

'Burning Several Poems of Ovid, Martial, Oldham, Dryden, &c' (Isaac Watts)

2008-10-19T21:56:00.002+11:00

The early eighteenth-century writer Isaac Watts was well-known for creating many hundreds of hymns, any number of which are currently being subjected to breathless covers on YouTube. He was also a poet, and in his Horæ Lyricæ: Poems Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, including an entertaining work entitled ‘Burning Several Poems of Ovid, Martial, Oldham, Dryden, &c’. The poem is said to be about how the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (here Strephon), recanted his saucy ways, and ‘refined’ his soul by throwing some of his own poems into the fire.

Fair enough, but I’ve never been quite sure about the title of the poem, which seems to be suggesting that Watts (or at least his editor) would have preferred to burn more than just the works of Rochester.

The poem:

[I]
I judge the Muse of lewd Desire;
Her Sons to Darkness, and her works to Fire.
In vain the Flatterers of their Wit
Now with a melting Strain, now with an heavenly Flight
Would tempt my Virtue to approve
Those gaudy Tinders of a lawless Love.
So Harlots dress: They can appear
Sweet, modest, cool, divinely Fair,
To charm a Cato’s Eye; but all within
Stench, impudence and Fire, and ugly raging Sin.
[II]
Die Flora, die in endless Shame,
Thou prostitute of blackest Fame,
Stript of thy false Array.
Ovid and all ye wilder Pens
Of modern Lust, who gild our Scenes,
Poyson the British Stage, and paint Damnation gay,
Attend your Mistress to the Dead;
When Flora dies her Imps should wait upon her Shade.
[III]
Strephon of noble Blood and Mind
(For ever shine his Name!)
As Death approach’d his Soul refin’d,
And gave his looser Sonnets to the Flame.
“Burn, burn, he cry’d with sacred Rage,
“Hell is the due of every Page,
“Hell be the Fate. (But O indulgent Heaven!
“So vile the Muse, and yet the Man forgiv’n!)
“Burn on, my Songs, for not the silver Thames
“Nor Tyber with his yellow Streams
“In endless Currents rolling to the Main
“Can e’er dilute the Poyson, or wash out the Stain.
So Moses by divine Command
Forbid the leprous House to stand,
When deep the fatal Spot was grown,
Break down the Timber and dig up the Stone.

Colin Steele in Rare Book Review

2008-10-15T16:43:00.005+11:00