In Fear of Book Assassination Haunts Bibliophile’s Musings, André Bernard reviews Nicholas Basbanes’ A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, a book that “examines the bonfires that have consumed entire centuries of man’s musings on matters great and small”:
In 1562, a Franciscan friar who had accompanied Spanish troops to Mexico ordered the burning of thousands of Mayan hieroglyphic books, in an attempt to eradicate the repository of local spiritual beliefs and to pave the way for Christianity. In one afternoon, practically the entire record of a civilization had been turned to ashes; only four codices are known to have survived. In 1914, the German Army invaded the Belgian city of Louvain, a treasure house of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. In an act of no military significance whatsoever, Louvain’s magnificent library of 300,000 volumes, which included nearly a thousand irreplaceable illuminated manuscripts, was burned to the ground. (“At Louvain,” said a man who watched it happen, “Germany disqualified itself as a nation of thinkers.”) More recently, during its psychopathic reign in Cambodia in the mid-1970′s, Pol Pot’s regime destroyed nearly all of ancient Cambodia’s manuscripts and monuments. In its rage against modernity and civilization, the Khmer Rouge went so far as to examine ordinary citizens for marks on the bridge of the nose, the telltale sign of reading glasses — which was enough to bring down a death sentence.
I’m surprised there are extant references to damnatio memoriae…
If books are not the most perishable products of human civilization, they have, throughout recorded history, attracted the homicidal attentions of every conquering army. In large-scale versions of the penalty the Romans called damnatio memoriae, a punishment for individuals found guilty of committing crimes against the state which involved erasing every reference — whether on stone, in a monument or on parchment — to the person in question, invaders have settled not just for mass murder of the local citizenry, but have indulged in the wholesale disappearance of every written trace of a culture (as the Taliban did to non-fundamentalist Afghans), a language (as the Normans did to the Saxons), a people (as the Romans did to the Etruscans). Early Christian and medieval monks attacked the memory of non-Christian culture with zealous efficiency.
Ooh, “bibliophilic tidbits”:
And, of course, there’s time for many bibliophilic tidbits. Here’s a quick sample. The great English politician William Gladstone read an average of 250 books a year as an adult, and wrote an essay on how to design and arrange a home library. The Lindisfarne Gospels, the 10th-century Beowulf codex, the sole surviving copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the unique copy of William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman were all saved from destruction by the same man, 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton. Not one literary or historical document of Etruscan origin has survived, not even in Greek or Roman translation. There is no known original manuscript of any work by Molière, nor have any poetry manuscripts by Edmund Spenser or Andrew Marvell ever been found. Charles Lamb included in his catalog of “books which are not books” — and therefore not readable — scientific treatises and almanacs. Norway has established a book repository in a series of tunnels hollowed deep into a mountainside in the Arctic Circle, where every book written in Norwegian is frigidly preserved, secure from the predations of the outside world.