Dort, wo man Bucher

Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

(“Whenever books are burned, men also, in the end, are burned.”)

(Heinrich Heine, philosopher, ‘Almansor’)

For a start, why does the Recreational Reader want to spend money on another book and not a new T-shirt? Well, let’s go back to Katie Carr; she looks to literature to “teach me the things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life” - which is not an uncommon among readers who look on literature as a branch of white magic. Many of us feel we’re almost duty bound to read books. They’re somehow good for us.

Back in the days of the old ‘Everyman’ imprint, the inside front cover of every title carried the famous quote from John Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ which states that “a good book [itals mine] is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” And he was far from alone in thinking this; to the essayist Charles Lamb, quality books were “spiritual repasts”, to Thomas Carlyle “a University” and “the purest essence of a human soul”, an attitude that dates back to the era when many of those who were privileged enough to be literate considered themselves duty bound not to squander their skills by reading rubbish or composing trifles.

 As such, books, or the best of them at any rate, were, and still are a distillation of what goes on inside the brains of mankind’s most eminent thinkers and creative artists. It’s like Humanity’s Greatest Hits, a physical repository of all that is worthwhile about homo sapiens. So by reading “good” books, we’re engaging in an act of self improvement, connecting ourselves to this ongoing tradition of defining endeavour. And the longer a book has held its own as a vital part of that tradition, the more resonant and resilient its meaning has proved itself to be.

So, viewed in this light, meaning, or rather the perceived survival of meaning, confers an increased value on the text. When buying a book, we’re hooking into the cultural (with a small ‘c’) mainstream almost by default, because books as books come complete with their own history.

This is actually Big Theme #8: Meaning = Value. And vice versa. As such, meaning becomes an aspirational quantity, and we often hope that by opening ourselves up to its influence, we’ll somehow be the better for it. It’s an utterly compelling ambition, but one whose origins are often difficult to pinpoint. It’s as if we’re hard-wired into believing it.

In Philip Larkin’s well-anthologized poem, ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, the narrator equates the gradual loss of his love of reading with the general absence of spirituality in his life, which leads him to famously conclude that “Books are a load of crap”. As his sense of wonder dims with age, so his tastes coarsen, and his opinion of the value of literature diminishes. It’s as if he’s voluntarily (and perversely) giving up his birthright, and if the guy wasn’t such an obvious arsehole you might even feel sorry for him.

But if you’re after less ambiguous testimony to the esteem in which reading is held, look up practically any child-development book or website, and there’s a wealth of unimpeachable and seemingly incontrovertible evidence, both academic and anecdotal,  that spiritual impoverishment will inevitably accompany a bookless childhood. To quote a random example, reading “sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly." And who wouldn’t wish that for their child? Whether you’re a linguistic philosopher like Noam Chomsky or a helper in a kindergarten, you’ll have arrived at the conclusion, albeit by very different paths,  that books are good for kids. And with most of us, that’s pushing against an open door because we somehow know it’s true, not least because many of us who now love reading caught the bug when we were young.

And this sense of Value is further reinforced by the fact that books are bound up with ideas of free speech and the dissemination of knowledge, so they tend to be a priority target for those who aren’t enamoured of those two fundamental human rights, or those fearful for the souls of the morally vulnerable. And we have a long and sometimes bloody history of censorship in this country that stretches from the dawning of the English language right through to the present day, which lends books even more meaning; people have actually died that we might continue to read them:

In the 1530’s, William Tyndale was repeatedly lambasted by Sir (now Saint) Thomas More for daring to print and distribute Bibles in English, then strangled and burned at the stake when he wouldn’t recant. The reason usually cited for this act of barbarity is Tyndale’s inclination towards Lutheranism, a heretical creed outlawed by the church in England at the time. And this was the ground of More’s challenge. But there was, of course, a far more fundamental principle at stake: at the root of the clergy’s objections was the fact that they no longer had the monopoly on translating, interpreting and explaining the Bible’s meaning now it was available in the lingua franca. Even though very few people could at that point in history read the new vernacular translation, the church knew its exclusive franchise had been broken, and that this represented the thin end of a very fat wedge which might eventually do them out of a job. Heaven forbid that people should be able to think for themselves and start challenging the status quo.

And so it’s continued up until 1960, when the last big home-grown stink over literary censorship was convincingly deodorized by the ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ trial, with the law once again proving that when it comes to guessing the public mood concerning literature, it is indeed an ass. I know it’s familiar, but I can’t resist quoting the often misquoted prosecuting council, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who effectively lost the case when he rose to his feet and instructed the jury:

Ask yourselves the question: would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?

The astonishing revelation that young girls could read, and, what’s more, that their fathers had the casting vote not just in their reading matter, but that of their wives and staff, was only marginally less ludicrous in 1960 than it is now. But what is perhaps not so well known is that ‘Lady Chatterley’ wasn’t the first of DH Lawrence’s novels to attract the censorious attentions of British law. Back in 1915, when his novel ‘The Rainbow’ first appeared, it was (rightly, this time) interpreted as not being entirely supportive of the Great War, and the police seized and burned 1,011 copies (as so often in British history, moronic acts are accompanied by scrupulous paperwork).

And of course, there was the sex: the book was banned by Bow Street magistrates after the police solicitor told them that the obscenity in the book "was wrapped up in language which I suppose will be regarded in some quarters as artistic and intellectual effort". The readers in those ‘quarters’ eventually won the day, and after the publication of ‘Lady Chatterley’ by Penguin (which sold nearly 2 million copies in its first year), it was only a matter of time before the position of the ‘official’ British censor, the Lord Chamberlain, was abolished in 1968 for being both outdated and unsustainable. (1)

Elsewhere in the world,  the symbolic and empirical value of books was clearly understood by those who set fire to entire libraries.

Library burning has long been a favourite tactic for those dictators, demagogues and oligarchs who wish to demoralize or destroy entire cultures, and, as with everything else, the Chinese got there first, during the reign of Shih Huang-ti in the third century BC.

At an imperial banquet in 213 BC, a Confucian scholar decided  he wanted to talk about historical continuity, and offered his opinion that only by studying the past could China move forward. The emperor's grand councilor Li Ssu angrily responded, "There are some men of letters who do not model themselves on the present, but study the past in order to criticize the present age. They confuse and excite the ordinary people. If such conditions are not prohibited, the imperial power will decline above and partisanship will form below." He was so enamoured of this idea, he ordered that all books in the empire be burned, with the exception of those that dealt with agriculture, medicine, and fortune telling. On top of that, it was decreed that even to discuss the forbidden works was punishable by death.

Then there was the notorious destruction of the greatest library of Western antiquity in Alexandria. No one seems to know exactly whose fault it was, not even Tom Stoppard, who marks the event in his 1993 play ‘Arcadia’, during which the budding (and rather theatrical) genius Thomasina says to her tutor, "Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle's own library! How can we sleep for grief?"  Whoever was responsible owes posterity - and Western culture - an explanation.

And on into the twentieth century. The desire to eradicate the past inspired Hitler's book-burning ceremonies of May 1933.  The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, told the students at the bonfires as they hurled the forbidden works into the conflagration, "These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era, they also light up the new." So that’s alright then. All in a good cause.

 And it’s still happening. In August 1992, in Bosnia, Serb forces targeted Sarajevo's multi-cultural National and University Library with a bombardment of incendiary grenades.

Bosnia's written heritage was consumed—a million and a half volumes, one hundred and fifty-five thousand of them rare books and manuscripts. The library's director said that the Bosnian Serbs "knew that if they wanted to destroy this multiethnic society, they would have to destroy the library”. So they did.

And at the time I’m writing this, the occupying forces in Iraq have determined that one of their top priorities is to restore the looted treasures of the Baghdad Library, alongside the reinstatement of essential services such as water and electricity.

Footnote:

1. Of course, the law still has to participate in the banning of any form of art if it’s judged to transgress the laws governing public decency, which still includes the charges of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. James Kirkup’s poem, ‘The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name’ (1976) was found guilty of blasphemous libel in the UK. It describes a Roman centurion's sex with Christ's corpse and asserts that Jesus had group sex with his disciples. It has been briefly quoted on a few occasions, though it remains an illegal text.