Kenneth Baker - On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word

The title page of Areopagitica, 1644.

To Milton the book was sacred, as it combined the memory of the past with a prospect of a life extending over centuries to come, and this really started my long love affair with books. Their significance has been recognised in many civilisations throughout the world and throughout history. In the Abbasid Caliphate of the ninth century the great Arabic scholar Al Jahiz, born in Basra and writing mainly in Baghdad, observed:

The composing of books is more effective than building in recording the accomplishments of the passing ages and centuries. For there is no doubt that construction eventually perishes and its traces disappear, while books handed down from one generation to another and from nation to nation remain ever renewed. Were it not for the wisdom garnered in books most of the wisdom would have been lost. The power of forgetfulness would have triumphed over the power of memory.

In the twentieth century Jorge Luis Borges said, Of all mens instruments the most outstanding is, without any doubt, the book. The others are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope are extensions of his eyes; the telephone an extension of his voice, then we have the plough and the sword extensions of his arm: the book is extension of memory and imagination. The key word is memory: for a book is not just a compendium of information, it also preserves the collective memory of its people with its foundation myths and fables, telling of its heroes and of battles won. It is the collective memory that any conqueror has to destroy. In Rome the Senate expunged the memory damnatio memoriae of those who had as traitors brought shame upon the city. George Orwells totalitarian government in 1984 had a department whose duty it was to collect books on the written record of the past, to be burnt in secret furnaces. Ray Bradbury in his novel Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which books burn) envisages a future America where all books are burnt, as they are old-fashioned, irrelevant or subversive. But there is a group of book drifters exiled to the country, where each learns a book by heart, so that the collective memory of America is preserved and one day they can be printed again.

Book burning has been so extensive and so perverse in its effect that I started to keep a note of the occurrences I came across which is how this book has come about. It does not attempt to be a comprehensive collection of all the many instances of mans folly there are other studies that list all the libraries and collections, great and small, that have been destroyed and the individual volumes consigned to the flames. Such studies are usually written by scholars and librarians for scholars and librarians.

As books have been victims throughout history I decided to focus on those events where books have been burnt quite deliberately for political, religious or personal reasons, as the motive behind their destruction is what has interested me. It is a personal anthology.

One of the first things I discovered was that those who inspired or organised the destruction of books were not louts, looters or thugs, but well-educated people often scholars who would have described themselves as civilised, just like the German professors who instructed their students to follow Goebbelss order to burn certain un-German books. They all had a common characteristic a conviction that their views must prevail, since theirs was the one certain route either to personal salvation or to political stability. If the retention of power, whether in a church, a mosque, a temple or a castle or cabinet room, was threatened by the written word, then throwing dangerous and offensive publications on the fire was the necessary first step to retain, enhance, defend and extend their power.

The power of religions or political regimes derives from their leaders absolute conviction that what they are doing is right. It is this moral certainty that has driven so many religions and regimes to impose belief, to compel obedience, to censor and burn books, to spy on dissidents, to imprison, to torture and to kill. Totalitarian regimes whether Fascist, Communist or Nationalist and fanatics nurtured by fundamentalist religions become so convinced of the utter correctness of their own position that they can justify the burning, the elimination of dissidents and today the public beheading of prisoners. This certainty was behind the Inquisition in Spain, Calvin in Geneva, Stalin in Russia, Hitler in the Third Reich, Mao in China, the Stasi in East Germany, the Generals in Brazil and Argentina and today the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS.