Burning Books - book review

I remember many years ago learning that ancient Egyptian civilizations had a habit of chiseling off the names of dead pharaohs from monuments and other public works and I thought at the time what a shame that was and what a loss to the historical record. "Burning Books" by Haig Bosmajian reminds us that Egyptians were not the last or only civilization to attempt to erase history. Probably book burning is almost as old as the written word, at least when the medium was paper, papyrus, or parchment. And although there are certainly other ways to destroy the written word, this book chronicles only the burning of them. It also details how much book burning symbolizes the murder or execution of the books' authors who were often burned at the same time as their works.

Bosmajian, after a preliminary chapter claiming to show that there is something special, almost spiritual, about destroying books by fire, spends the bulk of his book describing book burnings according to the three main reasons that books are burned: blasphemous/heretical books, seditious/subversive books, and obscene/immoral books. Of course, when someone is violently opposed to the contents of a book they seem to find a way to make a book fit all three categories. Historically, however, it seems that blasphemy/heresy book burning preceded those for sedition/subversion while obscene/immoral books are really a latecomer on the scene. Apparently early books were expensive enough to produce that pornography was limited to the rich, upper-class.

I shudder to think how much more we would know about the world's great and less great civilizations had fewer books been burned. The entire pre-Columbian western hemisphere culture, for example, has been lost to us because of the Catholic church's fanatical destruction of books or any other evidence of pre-Columbian religion. Even non-religious artifacts and history were burned because they didn't take the time to sort out which was which.

This book is a great starting point for anyone interested in the destruction of history.