The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  Across the room, Xochitl Oliva, the senior librarian in charge of digitization and special collections at Central, opened the first of several boxes that had just been delivered to the department. They were donated to the library by a student anti-war group, active from 1967 to 1971, known as the L.A. Resistance. The material in the box was ephemera produced for the group’s activities, including posters, pictures, newsletters, and leaflets. Most of the material had spent the last thirty years stored in a Northern California tree house belonging to one of the members. Recently, the group members had decided to empty their closets and, evidently, their tree houses, and wanted to find a permanent home for their archives. The library had come to mind. The donation was enthusiastically accepted. “This is amazing stuff,” Oliva said, rifling through the box. “It’s real history.”

  I left the Digitization Department and took one of my frequent walks around the building. I was just trying to soak in the place, to notice it. Sometimes it’s harder to notice a place you think you know well; your eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It’s almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.

  Right before learning about the library fire, I had decided I was done with writing books. Working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match, and I wasn’t in the mood to grapple with such a big commitment again. But here I was. I knew part of what hooked me had been the shock of familiarity I felt when I took my son to our local library—the way it telegraphed my childhood, my relationship to my parents, my love of books. It brought me close, in my musings, to my mother, and to our sojourns to the library. It was wonderful and it was bittersweet, because just as I was rediscovering those memories, my mother was losing all of hers. When I first told her that I was writing a book about libraries, she was delighted, and she said she was proud that she had a part in making me find them wondrous. But soon the dark fingers of dementia got her in their grip, and they pried loose random bits of her memory every day. The next time I reminded her about the project and told her how much I had been thinking about our trips to Bertram Woods, she smiled with encouragement but with no apparent recognition of what I meant. Each time I visited, she receded a little more—she became vague, absent, isolated in her thoughts or maybe in some pillowy blankness that filled in where the memories had been chipped away—and I knew that now I was carrying the remembrance for both of us.

  My mother imbued me with a love of libraries. The reason why I finally embraced this book project—wanted, and then needed, to write it—was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened? My mother was the one person besides me who knew what those gauzy afternoons had been like. I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.

  The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

  In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.

  9.

  La biblioteca perdida (2013)

  By Dean, A. M.

  S

  Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei: Eine Historische Darstellung in Tagebuchblattern (Vom 1. Januar 1932 bis Zum 1. Mai 1933) (1934)

  By Goebbels, Joseph

  G 943.085 G593-2

  The Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict: Commentary on the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and Its Protocol, Signed 14 May, 1954 in The Hague, and on Other Instruments (1996)

  By Toman, Jiri

  709 T655

  The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001)

  Edited by Rose, Jonathan. Series: Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

  940.5315296 H7545-4

  People have been burning libraries for nearly as long as they’ve been building libraries. As William Blades wrote in 1880 in one of the first books about burning books, libraries are easy victims of “chance conflagrations, fanatic incendiarism, judicial bonfires, and even household stoves.” The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

  The most celebrated lost library of the ancient world was Egypt’s Library of Alexandria. Though it figures large in anecdotal history, very little is actually known about the library. There is no record of what the building looked like or even its exact location. Supposedly, the library contained a half million documents and manuscripts and had a staff of one hundred resident librarians. The Library of Alexandria is said to have burned several times. The first occasion was when Julius Caesar attacked the Port of Alexandria in 48 BCE. Caesar hadn’t targeted the library, but the fire he started in the port spread and eventually engulfed it. The library was rebuilt and restocked, but it was burned twice more in subsequent assaults on the city. Each time it was restored.

  The last and final burning, which erased it from history forever, occurred in AD 640. By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers. When Caliph Omar, who led the Muslim invasion of Egypt, came upon the library, he told his generals that its contents either contradicted the Koran, in which case they needed to be destroyed, or they supported the Koran, in which case they were redundant. Either way, the library was doomed. It burned for six months until there was almost nothing left to burn, and the few remaining books were used as fuel to heat water at local bathhouses.

  Everything about the Library of Alexandria was enigmatic. To this day, no one is sure whether the stories about it are true. Even its dramatic end by fire has been questioned; some historians believe that earthquakes and a shrunken budget brought on its demise. It is a touchstone of all library history, but its beginning, middle, and end remain
a mystery.

  In the saga of humankind, most things are done for money—arson especially—but there is no money to be made by burning libraries. Instead, libraries are usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the pope ordered Jewish books to be collected and “cremated” (the choice of terms at the time) because he believed they spread anti-Catholic thought. The Spanish Inquisition introduced the idea of book-burning festivals, which were community gatherings around bonfires made of “heretical” books, including any written in Hebrew, especially the Torah.

  The Spanish continued their book burning abroad. In the mid-1500s, Hernán Cortés and his soldiers burned scores of Aztec manuscripts on the grounds that they contained black magic. After Cortés’s victory, a priest named Diego de Landa was assigned to inflict Catholicism on the Mayan people. De Landa was fascinated by Mayan culture, yet he oversaw the torture and murder of scores of Mayans, and he burned every Mayan book and image he found. Only a few codices are known to have survived De Landa’s purge, and those are among the only remaining documents of the Mayan civilization.

  You could fill a book with the list of lost libraries of the world, and in fact, there have been many books written about them, including one with the haunting title Libricide, written by a professor of library science. Early in history, when there were fewer books, and printing copies was expensive and time-consuming, the loss of a library could be terminal. UNESCO released studies in 1949 and in 1996 listing all the libraries that have been demolished throughout modern history. The number of books destroyed, by UNESCO’s count, is so enormous—in the billions—that I sometimes find it hard to believe there are any books left in the world.

  War is the greatest slayer of libraries. Some of the loss is incidental. Because libraries are usually in the center of cities, they are often damaged when cities are attacked. Other times, though, libraries are specific targets. World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, “the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.” The assault on books in Germany began even before the war. As soon as Hitler became chancellor, he banned all publications that he designated as subversive. Books by Jewish and leftist authors were automatically included in the ban. On May 10, 1933, thousands of the banned books were collected in Berlin’s Opera Square for an event called Feuersprüche, or “Fire Incantations.” The Feuersprüche was a pet project of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s propaganda chief, who understood how fundamental books were to Jewish culture, theology, and identity. Burning Jewish books, in his opinion, was an ideal form of bloodless torture, demonstrating the limitlessness of German control. Members of the German student union carried out the book burning with enthusiasm. At Opera Square, the students formed a human chain, passed the books from hand to hand, and then cast them into a pile. Estimates of the number of books in the bonfire pile range from twenty-five thousand to ninety thousand. As each book was thrown in, a student announced the reason this particular book was being “sentenced to death.” The reasons were stated like criminal charges. The books of Sigmund Freud, for instance, were charged with spiritual corruption and “the exaggeration and unhealthy complication of sexuality.” After reading the charge, the student threw the book into the pile while declaring, “I commit to the flames the works of Sigmund Freud!” Other charges included “Judeo-democratic tendencies”; “mutilation of the German language”; and “literary betrayal of the soldiers of the Great War.” Once the pile was complete, it was drenched with gasoline and set on fire.

  The Feuersprüche had a party atmosphere, with dancing, singing, and live music. At midnight, Goebbels appeared and gave a raving discourse known as the Fire Speech. That same night, similar events were held in Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, and Breslau, and more than thirty other Feuersprüches took place in university towns around Germany over the next year. In Bonn, as the books were being consumed, the mayor reportedly said that the ashes looked as if “the Jewish soul [had flown] into the sky.”

  The spectacle of destroying books was particularly excruciating for Jews, who have long been known as “people of the book.” Judaism considers books sacred, and its most sacred text, the Torah, is doted upon, dressed in a cloth mantle, and decorated with jewels, a silver breastplate, and a crown. When religious books wear out, they are buried and receive a funeral service. Jews believe books are more than just printed documents; they believe books have a kind of humanity and a soul. Rabbinical authors often stop using their given names and choose to be called by the title of their books. The irony of the Feuersprüche was that they treated books as seriously as Jews did. To feel the need to destroy them acknowledged the potency and value of books, and recognized the steadfast Jewish attachment to them.

  The grinding destruction of the war crushed the libraries of Europe. Some were merely unlucky and got caught in fire bombings and aerial attacks meant for more strategic targets. But the German army singled out books for destruction. Special book-burning squads known as “Brenn-Kommandos” were sent out to burn libraries and synagogues. The squads were effective. Enumerating the losses of libraries in the war, both incidental and purposeful, is dizzying. Twenty major libraries containing two million books were destroyed in Italy. France lost millions more, including 300,000 in Strasbourg, 42,000 in Beauvais, 23,000 in Chartres, and 110,000 in Douai. The Library of the National Assembly in Paris burned down, taking with it countless historic arts and science books. In Metz, officials hid the library’s most valuable books in an unmarked warehouse for safekeeping. A German soldier found the warehouse and threw an incendiary device into it. Most of the books, including rare eleventh- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, were destroyed. During the Blitz, twenty million books in Great Britain burned or were wrecked by the water used to extinguish the fires. The Central Lending Library in Liverpool was completely ruined. (The rest of the city’s libraries stayed open throughout the Blitz, maintaining regular hours and levying the usual overdue fines.)

  After the 1938 Munich Conference, every book in the Czech language that dealt with geography, biography, or history was confiscated and either burned or mashed into pulp. In Vilnius, Lithuania, the library in the Jewish ghetto was set on fire. A few months later, the residents of the ghetto were shipped to concentration camps and gassed, illustrating the truth in German poet Heinrich Heine’s warning: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.” In Budapest, all small libraries and at least part of every major one was destroyed. Belgium’s huge Library of the University of Louvain suffered more than almost any library in Europe. In World War I, the German army had burned it down. After the Armistice, a consortium of European nations rebuilt the library, and it reopened to great celebration. In 1940, the library was hit by German artillery fire, and all of the books in its stacks were lost, including Old Masters prints and almost one thousand books published before 1500. In Poland, eighty percent of all books in the country were destroyed. In Kiev, German soldiers paved the streets with reference books from the city’s library to provide footing for their armored vehicles in the mud. The troops then set the city’s libraries on fire, burning four million books. As they made their way across Russia, the troops burned an estimated ninety-six million more.

  The Allies’ bombing of city centers in Japan and Germany inevitably hit libraries. Theodore Welch, who studies libraries in Japan, has written that by the time the American army arrived in 1945, three quarters of all the books in the country’s libraries had been burned or damaged. The losses in Germany were astonishing. Most of the library books in cities including Bremen, Aachen, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, Hanover, Münster, and Hamburg were incinerated. Three quarters of a million were destroyed in Darmstadt; more than a million in Frankfurt; two million in Berlin. By the end of the war, more than one third of all the books in Germany
were gone.

  The devastation of libraries and other cultural property during the war frightened the world’s governments into taking measures to ensure it would never happen again. In 1954, an international treaty known as The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was adopted. Currently, 127 countries are signatories. Nevertheless, the protection of cultural property, including books, manuscripts, art, monuments, and important archaeological sites, has been negligible. Destruction occurred even immediately after the treaty was signed. It is almost as if the flamboyance of the Nazi Feuersprüche confirmed that burning books was an easy way to land a vicious blow on a community, and the idea was adopted by other oppressive regimes. When he was in his mid-twenties, Mao Tse-tung was an assistant librarian at Peking University. He often said that spending time in the library was how he discovered Karl Marx and had his political awakening. But just as some doctors become murderers, Mao was a librarian who became a book burner. Once in power, he ordered the destruction of any books he deemed “reactionary, obscene, and absurd.” During the Cultural Revolution, he ordered a purge of books that espoused old ideas and customs, and he sent the Red Guard to “cleanse” the libraries of Tibet. In some libraries, every book was burned except for those by Marx, Lenin, and Mao himself.

  More recently, the Khmer Rouge threw the books of the Cambodian National Library on the streets and burned them; only twenty percent survived. The Iraqi army burned most of the libraries in Kuwait after the 1990 invasion. Almost two hundred libraries were burned during the Bosnian War, and ninety percent of the contents of the National Library of Sarajevo was destroyed. The poet Phil Cousineau wrote that “the ashes from the million and a half books burning” blackened the snow that fell on Sarajevo. Under Taliban rule, fifteen of the eighteen libraries in Kabul, Afghanistan, were closed, and most of their books were burned. During the Iraq war, only thirty percent of the books in the Iraqi National Library were spared. Some of them had been removed from the building before fighting reached Baghdad: Saddam Hussein had stolen many for his private collection, and Iraqis who suspected that the library would not survive the war had hidden books in their homes. As Islamist jihadis retreated from Timbuktu in 2013, they destroyed many of the Timbuktu Library’s irreplaceable manuscripts, including some from as early as the thirteenth century.