A Universal History of the Destruction of Books

[caycepollard]

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books
From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq

Fernando Baez

On the cover, Noam Chomsky is quoted as saying this is the best book written on this subject, and I am not one to argue with Chomsky. This is a book for people who love books, but it's a bit like urging a humanitarian to read a comprehensive account of genocide throughout human history. Tread carefully. Prepare to mourn. The loss recorded within is devastating. Blow after blow, library after library, collection after collection destroyed, as empires fall and are rebuilt, emperors and monarchs ascend and descend, and people simply change their minds. Religion burns books, as does anti-religion. Authors burn their own books, or order their wives, children, and friends to burn them after they are dead. People burn books because they think the books are dangerous, they burn them as acts of vandalism, and they burn them as acts of damnatio memoriae - the conscious, specific act of removal from memory.

I've been a bit obsessed with memory and personal record keeping lately, and as I held this book I felt a compulsion to own it. I will have to buy another copy before I turn this one back in to the library. A history of lost things is a way of keeping the things.

A side-note: wherever people have burned books, other people have fought to preserve them. Hidden beneath false covers, enclosed behind hidden panels, even buried in caves and tombs, throughout history, people have risked and sacrificed their lives to preserve books.

These excerpts are merely a sampling, a few tastes of this history of the destruction of books.



Among the books burned [by Alexander the Great] was the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism. This loss meant the Zoroastrians had to reconstruct the work from memory. By order of the Sassanid prince Ardasir I, during the third century BCE, it was called the Zendavesta. There were those who said the original book contained sentences that could confer immortality on believers. - p. 31 - The Near East

In 213 BCE, the year when a group of men tried to gather together all books in Alexandria, Emperor Qin Shi Huang approved the burning of all books except those that dealt with agriculture, medicine, or prophecy. He hid treatises on alchemy, meditation and shamanism. He protected the ancient divination writings, which were preserved on bones and tortoise-shells...
Animated by his action against the caste of the learned, the emperor created an imperial library, dedicated to the vindication of the writings of the Legalists, defenders of his regime and of the thesis that the law was the principle of the state. He then ordered all other books burned. Functionaries went from house to house seizing books, which they then burned in a bonfire, to the joyful surprise of those who hadn't read them. More than 400 stubborn men of letters were buried alive... - p69 - China

During the spring of 415, a mob of devout monks, led by a certain Peter, a disciple of the venerable Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, seized Hypatia while she was in the midst of a lecture, accusing her of being a witch. She defended herself and screamed, but no one dared help her. The monks dragged her to the Cesarion church. There, with the public looking on, they brutally beat her with roof tiles. They pulled out her eyes and cut out her tongue. When she was dead, they carried her body to a place called Cinarus and cut it to pieces. The removed her internal organs and bones and finally burned her remains on a pyre. Their intention was the total annihilation of everything Hypatia symbolized as a woman.

...In his Life of Isidore, Damascius recounts: "Cirilus was so eaten up with jealousy that he plotted the murder of that woman so that it would happen as soon as possible. The city prefect, ashamed of himself, ordered an investigation of Hypatia's death and put a certain Edesius in charge. Almost immediately, Edesius received money from Cyril, to 'forget' things, and Hypatia's murderer remained unpunished. - p87 - Rome and Early Christianity.

A similar story takes place in the monastery of St Gall, Switzerland, in926. Huns attempted to slaughter the monks and set fire to the monastery, which would have meant the end of thousands of carefully preserved works. The Swabian woman in charge of the library, Weborada, had a vision. What she saw we don't know, but the afternoon of the day before the attack, which began at dawn on May, she buried the books. According to the chronicle, the besieged overcame their attackers. However, the fire consumed the monastery and Wiborada's library. Mutilated, she was found laying on top of a mound of earth where the books were later discovered intact. Her act won her sainthood; she is the patron saint of all bibliophiles and the first woman formally canonized by the church. - page 105 - Between Monks and Barbarians


The principal problem of the Middle Ages was the diversity of movements, which made it virtually impossible to know the true motives of each group considered heretical. In 1259, the Flagellants appeared: they promised salvation to all who whipped themselves for thirty-three days. In the same year, the Adamites proclaimed a return to original nudity; the Bogomili exalted free love, the Cathars proposed a return to Manichaeism and denied the sacraments; the Städinger, or sect of the Catini, defended total sexual freedom, and the Euchites refused to reject the Devil because he was God's son. - p121 - Misplaced Medieval Fervor



The royal decree of the Regent Juana expressly prohibited the importation of books and obliged printers to request clearance for their work from the Council of Castile. The Index forbade all Bibles in the vernacular. Works by Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, the Talmud, the Koran and books about diviniation, superstition, sexuality and necromancy were likewise not allowed to circulate. p147 - The Renaissance

After his death in 1890, the explorer and ethnologist Sir Richard Francis Burton was censored by his own family, in this case, his wife. Isabel Burton, also a talented writer, decided to burn her husband's diaries, letters, and private papers, reportedly after receiving express orders to do so from Burton's ghost. Before she did so, she examined the irreverent chapters of The Scented Garden, a new translation of The Perfumed Garden, an erotic work of Arab origin, in which the sexual faculties are analyzed and remedies offered for impotence and nymphomania. The widow had received two offers for the manuscript: one for 3,000 pounds and later a second for twice that sum. These huge amounts aroused her curiosity. After reading it, she elected to destroy the manuscript despite the amount offered. - p155 - England.

...No ancient library was exempt from fire. In Canterbury, for example, in 1067 a fire reached the original monastic buildings and reduced hundreds of books toa shes. Around 1184, an intense fire in the library of Glastonbury Abbey, where the Holy Grail was supposedly hidden, burned scores of books. This tragedy was repeated everywhere: in 1318, the library of the All Saints Church as destroyed. In 1440, the entire library of the monastery of Megapisleon burned, and in 1660, rebuilt, it burned again. According to legend, the fire spontaneously leapt out of book. - p173 - Fires, Wars, Mistakes, and Messiahs

On April 27, 1913, after their victory at the Battle of York, American soldiers advanced on what is present-day Toronto and there burned the Parliament and the legislative library. The English responded rapidly and reached Chesapeake Bay in the August of 1814. Library director Magruder had left the capital for "reasons of health," and named one J. T. Frost, forty-five years old and thus too old to be called up for military duty, to take his place. One of the few government employees to remain at his post as the British inexorably advanced on the city, Frost busied himself evacuating hundreds of books and documents. He saved what he could, and finally left just hours ahead of the invading forces...the new Library of Congress was torched on August 24. - p181 - Fires, Wars, Mistakes, and Messiahs

[The burning of the Central Library of Los Angeles in 1986] was the single worst library fire to take place in a nation where the most modern mechanisms for the protection of libraries exist. It was six days after the world celebration of the Day of the Book. Despite the efforts of sixty fire companies, the fire burned for seven hours. At least 400,000 books burned and 400,000 more were damaged. The special collection dedicated to American inventions, science, and technology, completely disappeared. the next day, all was ruins and desolation. Starting at four in the afternoon, some 1,500 volunteers carried the books, in 100,000 boxes, to a salvage depot. The wet books had to be dried and cleaned. The losses exceeded 20 million dollars. The fire had been deliberately set. - p183 Fires, Wars, Mistakes, and Messiahs

Of the approximately twenty million books and pamphlets in the Library of Congress, approximately thirty percent are in such critical condition that they cannot circulate. An inspection of the New York Public Library revealed that around fifty percent of its five million books are on the brink of disintegration. This phenomenon is observable in the greatest university research libraries. Millicent Abell, at the Yale library, calculates that some seventy-six million books all over the United States are literally turning to dust. -p263, On the Natural Enemies of Books