Sacred books

She just couldn't avoid taking it personally: sending a choice title back to the publishers was like sending a perfectly good pooch to the pound, knowing it would be euthanized.

Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

As the person in charge of our condo library, I must make the decisions about which books win spots in our limited shelf space and what to do with the others. Some of these discarded books get donated for the next Friends of the Library book sale. Others go to Goodwill. Those that are worn or torn get tossed into the recycling bin. It is that last category of books that troubles my conscience.

Matthew Sullivan

Those of us who value books hate even the thought of destroying them. Even the sight of a book with a broken spine or a dog-eared page can bother us. To us, as George Orwell might have put it, all books are sacred, even if some are more sacred than others. A Gutenberg Bible? Very sacred. A first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird? Sacred. A beat-up Nora Roberts paperback? Just a little bit sacred. Yet what else am I to do with that Nora Roberts paperback and all the other worn-out books?

In the Matthew Sullivan novel Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore he has a character who was once a librarian but later became a prison guard. Even a prison library can't accept all book donations, so this man takes all the rejects home and shelves them in his own house until there is hardly room for him to move around. That is more extreme than I want to be, but still I can see where he's coming from.

This man's daughter, the woman mentioned in the quotation above, works in a bookstore and has a similar problem. Books that don't sell, or don't sell quickly enough, are sent back to their publishers to make room for newer books. The publishers may remainder these books, which means putting an ink blot on the top or bottom and sending them back to bookstores to be discounted. Or they may simply be destroyed. She views returning a good book to the publisher as being like taking a good dog to the pound.

It occurs to me that the ideal employee in either a library or a bookstore should love books, but not excessively so. Those who love books will take good care of them, shelve them and display them properly and perhaps even make an extra effort to place the right book in the right patron's hands. Employees who love books to excess may become too protective, as in the above examples. Or they may simply ignore their work and try to read as many of the books that surround them as possible during working hours. Or perhaps even steal them.

In The Library Book, Susan Orleans writes about the fire that all but destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. The thought of burning books repulsed her, yet for some reason she decided that her research should include burning a book, just to see how it burned and how quickly. But which book should she burn? She describes her selection process in some detail, but finally she settles on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. This strikes me as one of the last books a book lover would choose to burn, since burning books is what Bradbury argues against in his novel. I might have selected a ragged James Patterson paperback because there being so many of these in the world and nobody would miss it. And it is much less sacred than Fahrenheit 451.