Julain Baggini begins his piece at aeon by asking the right questionNo civilised person is supposed to make bonfires of books. ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in the century before Nazism. Burning books is a sacrilegious act, and the taboo against it particularly binds writers. So what was I doing in a Somerset field lighting a match under the 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica?He then explains his process and his dilemma in detail. In the end it is very difficult to see any reason why...
Fahrenheit 451 with a match
Check out this cover design for Ray Bradbury's classic, Fahrenheit 451. It was done for The Austin Creative Department by Elizabeth Perez.The match lives in the 1 and the spine is screen-printed with a matchbook striking paper surface.A incendiary copy! Wow.For Perez it is actually a redesign of this earlier cover:
Fifty Shades of Grey on Fire
Calling the runaway bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey "bad for marriages and particularly bad for men" a radio show in Cleveland called on its listeners to bring copies of the book to a local establishment to have them burned.As usual with these covert marketing events the burning was a dud with just six copies of the book and one Nook going up in flames. Previously on book patrol: Church Plans on Burning the Qur'an on 9/11Digital Book BurningBurning Books to Stay WarmA Halloween Book Burning: Only God's Word Will SurviveThe Chinese Book Burner and the Great Wall of Books
Bill O’Reilly gets burned
At a remote location in Afghanistan a Commander ordered a soldier to burn 20 copies of Bill O'Reilly's book Pinheads and Patriots.As one of the soldiers involved summed it up:Some jerk sent us two boxes of this awful book (SPOILER ALERT: George Washington — Patriot; George Soros — Pinhead) instead of anything soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan might need, like, say, food or soap. Just burned the whole lot of them on my Commander's orders. Acknowledging "people’s squeamishness about setting books ablaze." the soldier went on to reiterate that they were stationed in an "extraordinarily remote location" and...
On This Day the Nazi’s Burned a lot of Books
May 10, 1933 was a bad day for books. The Nazi's designated the day as the one to burn all the "nation-corrupting books and journals" that existed within Germany. The goal was to rid the country of “un-German spirit."Germans view the "pillar of shame" (Schandpfal), a display of "un-German" books and periodicals mounted on a tree stump in the Cathedral Square in Münster. May 6, 1933. "You are doing the right thing at this midnight hour—to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past. This is a great, powerful, and symbolic act. . . . Out of these ashes...