“Violence against books is understood by all parties involved as being comparable to violence against people and/or ideas and that violence against a book can quickly lead to other forms of conflict.” Cordell Waldron, Iconic Books blog.
But what if the violence is not motivated by politics or religion but by commerce?
Earlier this month word got out that a U.S. soldier used a Quran for target practice.
Here’s the video of the AP story and the apology by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad. To think that this was an isolated incident would be a bit of a stretch.
In Israel police are looking into the burning of hundreds of copies of the New Testament. Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, a town outside Tel Aviv, is being investigated for organizing a group of students who set fire to several hundred copies of the New Testament.
Apparently the bibles were distributed by a messanic Jewish group who in the words of Ahron “encouraged one to go against Judaism.” When Ahron got word he “drove around the neighborhood with a loudspeaker asking residents to gather all the New Testaments that were given to them. The yeshiva boys then went from apartment to apartment and picked up the books.” Then they burned them. The deputy mayor has since apologized but the damage has been done.
This is a far cry of the recent book burnings undertaken by booksellers to do away with unwanted and unsaleable inventory. Here there is no political or religious motive but the act of book burning is laden with so much historical baggage, this is after all the month of the 75th anniversary of the Nazi Book burnings, that any application is destined to stir up controversy.
Abebooks recently interviewed Shaun Bythell of the The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland who in 2005 staged a book burning during a festival in Wigtown. Bythell gives us two reasons for the torching. The first is purely a marketing one “I wanted to help promote Wigtown as Scotland’s National Book Town, and with no advertising budget I had to think of some way of getting media coverage without paying for it.” says Bythell.
The second and the one that in a sense legitimizes the act as a form of inventory reduction is “to highlight the fate of books which have reached the end of their useful life.” Bythell burned upwards of 3,000 books, each selected “based entirely on commercial value, so most of them were in damaged or unreadable condition, or just so out of fashion and with so little value if they ever became fashionable again that they were not worth holding on to.” Sounds like it might be a better option than sending 3,000 books to the landfill.
How did Bythell feel about the burning:
“I didn’t feel any remorse about burning the books, as a dealer you have no choice when it comes to dead stock. If you don’t keep it moving you’ll end up with a shop full of books nobody wants to buy. To be honest I felt a sense of relief as it went up in smoke, both because it burned OK and because it was out of my stock room and no longer causing congestion.”
and for those from the “knee-jerk ‘book burning is a bad thing’ brigade” who immediately liken the activity to the Nazi book burnings Bythell offers this: “Although there are historical associations, there is no causal link between burning books and oppression, and to assume that everyone who burns books is an oppressor is a sign of an underdeveloped mind.”
In the publicity material for the burning Bythell reminds us of this quote from Rabbi Akiba Ben Joseph, ‘The paper burns, but the words fly away.’”