Each Destroyed Book Is a Passport to Hell

Scott McLemee has an interesting column on a new book that outlines the history of book destruction: A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. The author, Fernando Baez, is Venezuelan and this book is a translation, though the theme is certainly American as is made clear by the subtitle (“From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq”).

McLemee notes some affinities that Baez’s work has with that of Borges and Burton:

In that regard, A Universal History also resembles Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which is the prototype of the learned miscellany. While not technically a librarian, Burton was a fervent book collector, and his Anatomy is, in part, a meditation on the complicated relationship between reading and the rest of one’s state of mind.

Borges was a consummate ironist, and Burton often wrote with a satirical edge. Báez seems altogether more earnest sort. He traces his preoccupation with the topic at hand to the horror of witnessing, as an adolescent, the ritual of students burning their textbooks at the end of the school year. It was “a tradition as contemptible as it is ancient,” he writes, sounding a bit indignant that still his classmates mocked him for protesting.

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