Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, (John Murray, 2021)
Kenneth Baker, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word, (Unicorn, 2016)
The aim of those vandals who burn books in an open forum is arguably to raise public awareness of the extent of their dislike of the books’ contents, but reveals their own failure to appreciate them. If these are good books, more fools they. Bad books should be ignored unless they advocate harm to others. The vandals may also seek to destroy all evidence that these books ever existed, yet, as the subtitle of Lord Baker’s book on the subject argues, this goal is doomed to failure. Helen Keller predicted the legacy of Nazi bonfires to jubilant Nazis in the wake of Goebbels’ fanatical concerted effort to “purify” German culture in May 1933, during which they destroyed her own works and those of such “impure” writers as Einstein, Freud, Zweig, and Hemingway, among many others. She wrote, “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels, and will continue to quicken other minds.” Even those misguided folk who burned the records of the Beatles failed in their mission: today the quartet is even more popular than ever, and their critics are long gone.
The title of Richard Ovenden’s book on the subject of book burning is a trifle misleading. As Oxford University’s Bodley Librarian, it is understandable that the author’s interest is confined to the wholesale destruction of libraries themselves, rather than with individual books. It begins with the aforementioned Nazi book burning, then concerns itself with Henry VIII’s rape of the library holdings of numerous abbeys and monasteries during the Reformation, yet omits entirely any mention of the Papacy’s notorious Index of Prohibited Books, created in 1557, and which, up until quite recently, presumed to monitor Catholics’ reading habits. It makes only passing reference to the destruction of Aztec and Incan written records, and makes far too much of the British burning of the Library of Congress, a retaliatory act prompted by the earlier burning of York (Toronto) by American imperialists in 1813. Ovenden correctly condemns the more recent Serbian destruction of Sarajevo’s National and Universal Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, appalling as this was, but devotes too much paper to an examination of the wishes of various writers, among them Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, to burn their own diaries and personal writing out of fear that they be misinterpreted years hence when they cannot answer their critics. His chapters on the digital revolution and its security implications for libraries are both enlightening and cause for concern. Yet the book’s greatest deficiency is its neglect of the question of the motivations for book burning which is only briefly mentioned, and which should surely have been central to the study of the subject.
