The end of the book has, by now, been debunked. The electronic book is no substitute for the paperback, after all. Amazon’s Kindle is apparently no more viable than the automated feeding system demonstrated in Chaplin’s Modern Times. Besides, computer software and digital media change so fast that paper — for all its seeming fragility — remains the surest means of projecting a text into the distant future (except, perhaps, for clay tablets).
Nevertheless, many artists and writers remain preoccupied with the end of the bookish culture that has nurtured so many of us in academe. Everything feels almost normal; we can still find books everywhere (we never have enough shelf space). But we still have a sense of impending doom; for some, that expectation seems to culminate in an apocalyptic vision straight out of Schindler’s List: An endless chain of unmarked trucks, crammed with books, wend their way beyond the uncomprehending suburbs to massive incinerators whose smokestacks belch the ashen remains of libraries — a holocaust for books: a bibliocaust.
It’s a term that made its last appearance in 1933, when torchlight processions carried thousands of books to bonfires in Berlin. The works of Jewish authors — entire historic archives — were given special attention by the book burners. As Heinrich Heine observed, people who start burning books conclude by burning human beings. “Forget them,” says a character in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — a book, like Orwell’s 1984, that is haunted by memories of 1930s totalitarianism. “Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
Lucien X. Polastron’s Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History (2007) catalogs more than 100 documented bibliocausts, and reflects on the ways that imperial domination and genocide have proceeded hand in hand with the destruction of libraries from ancient China and Mesopotamia to modern Sarajevo and Iraq: “A great collection of books is a threat to the new power.”
Naturally, we associate the destruction of books with historic atrocities, but Polastron also calls attention to the “great extermination of libraries” in our own time by the people charged with their protection, who are, apparently, disposing of books by the ton to make way for supposedly more-economical new media.
Nicholson Baker wrote an entire book on that subject: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), which I’ve described before. Baker shows how, in recent years, libraries have justified the destruction of countless books and periodicals by replacing them with expensive microfilm, always inferior to real print and, in many cases, already unusable. With our libraries seemingly held hostage by managers who regard books as a burden, the only hope seems to be private action: the saving of discarded volumes by concerned collectors such as Baker himself, who has created an archive of deaccessioned newspapers like a monk saving a few scrolls from the fire that supposedly consumed the Library of Alexandria in the 4th century.
It seems a remarkable coincidence that A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq (2008) by Fernando Baez, director of Venezuela’s National Library, has been published within a year of Books on Fire. Baez’s thesis — the annihilation of memory as an essential part of the working of power — affirms and complicates Polastron’s reflections.
Baez’s most-provocative observation is that the destroyers of books tend to be “well-educated people, cultured, sensitive, perfectionists, painstaking, with unusual intellectual gifts, depressive tendencies, incapable of tolerating criticism, egoists, mythomaniacs, members of the middle or upper classes, with minor traumas in their childhood or youth, with a tendency to belong to institutions that represent constituted power, charismatic, with religious and social hypersensitivity.”
Libraries are not stormed like the Bastille; they are stripped of their holdings by Robespierres, bureaucrats convinced of their dedication to the common good. Books are often sacred objects; there are no sacred computers — and that is precisely the point of replacing one with the other, just as the cathedrals of Paris were made into “Temples of Reason.” A bibliocaust need not be so dramatic as the causal sacking in 2003 of the Iraqi National Museum and archive described in detail by Baez; all that is required is the gradual reallocation of budgets.
Candida Höfer’s Libraries (2006), which I’ve written about before (The Chronicle, February 16, 2007), showcases many of the world’s great institutions. But it’s a book haunted by empty spaces: library shelves — and entire libraries — with bookless aisles of desktop computers, and an antiseptic, white room filled with black supercomputers. Her images affirm Polastron’s claim that, instead of the messy, organic reality of physical texts, modern architecture demands “dematerialized books” to accompany its minimalist aesthetic dogmas.
Just as Ludwig Meidner and Edvard Munch anticipated the horrors of World War I, photographers such as Höfer, Rosamond Purcell, and Abelardo Morell have been silently screaming about the end of the book. In the works of Morell and Purcell, books are not being burned; they are more likely to be decomposing slowly, unnoticed, like unclaimed bodies on a battlefield.
In Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things (2003), Purcell uses images and text to depict the collections of a Maine junk dealer as the memory warehouse of a fading civilization. The most-poignant images are often books: filigreed by termites, inhabited by birds, moldering in shelves like stacked coffins. These photographic meditations are more fully realized in color in Purcell’s Bookworm (2006).
Morell’s A Book of Books (2006), introduced, tellingly, by Nicholson Baker, includes many intimate, monochrome portraits of aged books, both massive and miniature, punctuated by gorgeous engravings of Roman ruins by Piranesi. The collection alludes to the dangers of the elements: a book encrusted with earth, another damaged by water. But Morell’s book is, in many respects, a tribute to Baker: An image of a microfilm reader illuminates a murder story in a newspaper that, perhaps, awaits destruction in a warehouse on the following page. The collection ends ambiguously with two images: a computer screen containing an old book (is it real or merely pixels?) and an old board covered by an alphabet written in dribbled water (the vanity of our desire for permanence).
All those images evoke a feeling that I have known most when reflecting upon my many visits to old bookstores of Boston and book barns of rural New England — most of them now gone — along with the uninterrupted months of reading I spent in the stacks of Widener Library, where one could find countless books that had not been opened in a century but that could be resurrected for any project to which my mind might turn. It all blends together now with the weekends I spent wandering the paths of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, filled with the same names that looked at me from the spines of those books. It is romanticism: We book lovers yearn to walk among the ruins; we are half in love with easeful death.
In Library: An Unquiet History (2003), in an essay called “Burning Alexandria,” Matthew Battles observes that, given the destruction of every major library through human history, the act of gathering books is always temporary. As history shows us, every great collection is eventually destroyed. The love of books is not just about the preservation of knowledge; it’s about the evanescence of knowledge: the recognition of our mortality. Writing is only a temporary hedge against death. Book lovers — as opposed to the rational accountants of terabytes and megapixels — cultivate a tragic sensibility: The materiality of the book — and the body — is the message.
The electronic book — and the claims of infinite preservation, access, and reproducibility — reflect a hubris that is anathema to the sensibility captured in nostalgic reflections on the book trade like Old Books, Rare Friends (1997), by Madeleine Stern and Leona Rostenberg, and Book Row (2005), by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador. Most recently, Larry McMurtry, in his just-published elegy, Books (2008), evokes the narrative of decline and fall: “How did one of the pillars of civilization come, in only fifty years, to be mostly unwanted?”
For such people, the bookstore is more than a business. “We always wanted not just books but a shop,” writes McMurtry. He laments the disappearance of secondhand bookshops, and concludes with a list of booksellers, many of which are marked, simply, as “gone,” the way 19th-century newspapers used to list the casualties of the battlefield as simply “dead.” The complex truth,” McMurtry writes, “is that many activities last for centuries, and then simply (or unsimply) stop.”
The most eloquent reflection I have found on the future of books is Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night (2006), which strikes a balance between romanticism and realism, nostalgia and foresight. His reflections on books and technology emphasize complementarity rather than conflict: “The birth of a new technology need not mean the death of an earlier one: The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader’s desk.”
And, it may be that electronic technology is even more fragile than books. “There may come a new technique of collecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness,” Manguel writes, “like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul.”
We are pained by the change of familiar bookish institutions, but, before long, I expect we will begin to feel nostalgia for the microfilm and the CD-ROM and yearn for a time when the Internet was as fresh and young as our belief in its capacity to replace the printed book and the library.