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New Directions in Book History
Series editors: Prof Jonathan Rose (Drew University, USA) and Dr Shafquat
Towheed (The Open University, UK)
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of matu-
rity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of
New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English
that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, writ-
ten by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extend-
ing to the Western and non-Western worlds and to all historical periods from
antiquity to the 21st century, including studies of script, print, and post-print
cultures.
New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the
vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored
archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected
subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic fields.
Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the
book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship.
New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-author
monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and
shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book
proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be
sent to either of the two series editors:
Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University.
He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship,
Reading and Publishing, and he is an editor of SHARP’s journal, Book History.
His works include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, The Holocaust
and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, A Companion to the History of the Book
(with Simon Eliot), and, most recently, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader,
Actor.
Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK. He is
director of the Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED) project and the
Open University’s Book History Research Group. He is co-editor of The History of
Reading (Routledge: 2010), The History of Reading, Vol.1: International Perspectives,
c.1500–1990 (Palgrave, 2011) and The History of Reading, Vol.3: Methods, Strategies,
Tactics (Palgrave, 2011).
Editorial Board:
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, Matt
Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, Martyn
Lyons, University of New South Wales, Claire Squires, University of Stirling
Titles include:
Bethan Benwell and James Procter (editors)
READING ACROSS WORLDS: TRANSNATIONAL BOOK GROUPS AND THE
RECEPTION OF DIFFERENCE
Jason McElligott and Eve Patten (editors)
THE PERILS OF PRINT CULTURE: BOOK, PRINT AND PUBLISHING HISTORY
IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (editors)
BOOK DESTRUCTION FROM THE MEDIEVAL TO THE CONTEMPORARY
New Directions in Book History

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–44325–9 hardback
978–1–137–45429–4 paperback
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a
standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us
at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the
ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Book Destruction from
the Medieval to the
Contemporary
Edited by
Gill Partington
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
and
Adam Smyth
Oxford University, UK
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Gill Partington
and Adam Smyth 2014.
Individual chapters © Contributors 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-36765-5
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-47455-4 ISBN 978-1-137-36766-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137367662
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Book destruction from the medieval to the contemporary / edited by Adam
Smyth, Gill Partington.
pages cm — (New directions in book history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Book burning—History. 2. Books—Mutilation, defacement, etc.—

History. 3. Libraries—Destruction and pillage—History. 4. Altered
books—History. 5. Waste books—History. 6. Books—Psychological
aspects. I. Partington, Gill, 1970– editor. II. Smyth, Adam, 1972– editor.
Z659.B66 2014
363.3109—dc23 2014022061
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Contents
List of Figures vii

Notes on the Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Gill Partington and Adam Smyth
Part I Burning
1 Burning Sexual Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi
Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin 17
Heike Bauer
2 Burning to Read: Ben Jonson’s Library Fire of 1623 34
Adam Smyth
Part II Mutilating
3 From Books to Skoob; Or, Media Theory with a Circular Saw 57
Gill Partington
4 ‘Book Torture’: An Interview with Ross Birrell 74
Adam Smyth, Gill Partington and Ross Birrell
Part III Doctoring
5 Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates and Graffiti: Dorothy
Helbarton’s Book 89
Anthony Bale
6 Doctoring Victorian Literature – A Humument: An Interview
with Tom Phillips 112
Adam Smyth, Gill Partington and Tom Phillips
Part IV Degrading
7 ‘Miss Cathy’s riven th’ back off “Th’ Helmet uh Salvation”’:
Representing Book Destruction in Mid-Victorian Print
Culture 135
Stephen Colclough
8 Waste Matters: Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling 152
Heather Tilley
v
vi Contents
Part V Deforming/Reshaping
9 The Aesthetics of Book Destruction 175
Kate Flint
10 Kindle – Recycling and the Future of the Book: An Interview
with Nicola Dale 190
Adam Smyth, Gill Partington and Nicola Dale
Select Bibliography 208
Index 213
List of Figures
0.1 (photo: MacMillan) 3

0.2 (photo: Gill Partington) 10
3.1 John Latham, ‘Book Plumbing’ (photo: Jennifer Pike) 58
3.2 John Latham, ‘The Laws of England’ (photo: Jennifer Pike) 60
3.3 John Latham, Unedited Material from the Star
(photo: Latham Estate) 66
3.4 John Latham, Unedited Material from the Star
(photo: Latham Estate) 69
4.1 Ross Birrell, Heidegger’s Being and Time thrown into the Grand
Canyon (video still: Courtesy Ellen de Bruijne Projects) 78
4.2 ‘Complete Works of Kafka Burned’ (1997)
(photo credit: Robert Johnson. Artist’s own collection) 79
4.3 Ross Birrell, ‘Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’ (1997)
(photo: Artist’s own collection) 81
(photo: Artist’s own collection) 82
(photo credit: Robert Johnson. Artist’s own collection) 83
5.1 Huntington Library MS HM 136, f. 99r. Brut with
top-margin bookplate, ‘Thys ys her boke wyche bereth
thys name dorethe’ 93
5.2 Huntington Library MS HM 136, f. (vii)r. Abbreviated
bookplate, ‘Liber Johis Leche de Wico Malbno in Com.
Cestr.’, with later rebus below 99
5.3 Huntington Library MS HM 129, f. 231r. Northern Homily
Cycle with effaced scribal and ownership inscription 102
6.1 Tom Phillips, A Humument (2011 edition © Tom Phillips.
All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013) 114
vii
viii List of Figures

8.1 Marcus Stone’s illustrated front cover to Our Mutual Friend
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1864–65) (Ada Nisbet Archive,
University of California, Santa Cruz) 163
10.1 Nicola Dale, ‘Down’ (photo: Artist’s own collection) 192
10.2 Nicola Dale, ‘A Secret Heliotropism’ (photo: Artist’s own
collection) 196
10.3 Nicola Dale, ‘Sequel’ (photo: Artist’s own collection) 198
10.4 Nicola Dale, ‘Sequel’ (detail; photo: Alan Seabright) 199
10.5 Nicola Dale, ‘Kindle’ (photo: Artist’s own collection) 203
Notes on the Contributors
Anthony Bale is Reader in Medieval Studies and Director of Graduate

Research at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of,
among other books and articles, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and
Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (2010), and The Jew in the Medieval
Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (2006). Anthony Bale convenes
the Research Network Remembered Places and Invented Traditions (2012).
In 2011, Anthony Bale was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize to sup-
port his research on European ideas of the Holy Land in the Middle
Ages.
Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at

Birkbeck, University of London, and founding director of Birkbeck
Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies (BiGS). She has pub-
lished widely on the history of sexuality, nineteenth- and twentieth-
century literary culture, and on translation including a monograph,
English Literary Sexology, 1860–1930 (2009), a three-volume anthology
on Women and Cross-Dressing, 1800–1939 (2006) and a collection of
essays on Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, edited
with Matt Cook (2012).
Ross Birrell is an artist, writer and lecturer at the Glasgow School of

Arts. In 2007 Birrell was awarded an SAC Artist’s Film & Video Award
to make a collaborative film with David Harding in Cuba and Miami:
Guantanamera launched at Glasgow International 2010 and has sub-
sequently been exhibited and screened in the Swiss Institute in Rome,
and at the Americas Society, New York. Previous films include Port Bou:
18 Fragments for Walter Benjamin (2006) and Cuernavaca: A Journey in
Search of Malcolm Lowry (2006). Birrell’s exhibitions have reached audi-
ences in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Paris and
New York. Birrell is also the editor of Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas,
Contexts and Methods.
Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature and

the history of the book in the School of English at Bangor University,
Wales. His publications include Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading
Communities, 1695–1870 (2007) and (co-edited with Alexis Weedon) The
History of the Book in the West: 1800–1914 (2010). He is a contributor
ix
x Notes on the Contributors
to The History of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (2011), The

Brontës in Context (2011) and The History of Oxford University Press (vol. 2,
2013). He is currently working on a monograph on the representation
of reading spaces in the early nineteenth century.
Nicola Dale studied at Manchester Metropolitan University. She

is based at Rogue Artists’ Studios in Manchester. Recent exhibi-
tions include Function (2011), BLOC, Sheffield; Working Title (2011),
Aspex, Portsmouth; Re-Covering (2011), Untitled Gallery, Manchester;
Exchange-Experimentation-Collaboration (2011), Chinese Arts Centre,
Manchester; The Open West (2011), Summerfield Gallery, Cheltenham;
The Manchester Contemporary 2010 (2010), Castlefield Gallery; Dream
Machine (2010), Metal, Liverpool; and The First Cut (2013), Manchester
Art Gallery. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Tate’s
Artist Book Archive.
Kate Flint is Provost Professor of English and Art History at the

University of Southern California. Author of The Woman Reader
1837–1914 (1993), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000) and
The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930 (2010), she is currently at work on
two projects: a cultural history of flash photography, entitled ‘Flash!
Photography, writing, and surprising illumination’ and a study of dis-
placed and transformed books and images.
Gill Partington writes and researches on the material text, reading

and readers, and the shifting constructions of fictional and real worlds.
She has published on diverse topics including German media theorist
Friedrich Kittler, book burning, fictional spaces in contemporary litera-
ture, and humous. She is currently completing a book about the figure
of the believing reader in twentieth-century culture.
Tom Phillips is a painter, printmaker and collagist, and the creator of A

Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1970, 1980, 1986, 1998, 2004, and
in 2010 as an iPhone and iPad app). He has had major solo exhibitions
of his work at the National Portrait Gallery (1989); the Royal Academy of
Arts (1993); the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1997); the South London
Gallery (1997); and at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (2001). He
was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989 and was Chairman
of the Royal Academy’s Exhibitions Committee from 1995 to 2007. He
curated the Royal Academy’s exhibition ‘Africa: The Art of a Continent’
(1995) which subsequently travelled to the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin
and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He is an Honorary Fellow
of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, Leeds University, and the London
Notes on the Contributors xi
Institute as well as an Honorary Member of the Royal Institute. Tom

Phillips is also a writer and a composer, and recently collaborated with
Tarik O’Regan on a chamber opera of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of
Darkness (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2011).
Adam Smyth is a Tutorial Fellow in English at Balliol College, Oxford,

and a University Lecturer in the History of the Book. He works on,
among other things, book destruction; laughter; autobiographical writ-
ing; error; the circulation of texts; editorial theory and the history of
the book; and poetry and the cultures of manuscript and print. Adam
Smyth is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (2010) and
Proﬁt and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–82 (2004),
and the editor of A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-
Century England (2004). He writes for the Times Literary Supplement and
The London Review of Books.
Heather Tilley is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at

Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research specialisms are in
nineteenth-century literature, visual, material and tactile culture, dis-
ability studies and Dickens. She has published articles on Wordsworth,
Dickens and Frances Browne and is currently working on a monograph
based on her PhD research, ‘Blindness and Writing: Wordsworth to
Gissing’.
Introduction
Gill Partington and Adam Smyth
Book shredding is difficult to watch. Not in the sense that it is uncom-

fortable – although some may find it so, and such feelings of discomfort
are one starting point for this volume. Mainly, however, it is difficult to
watch because no one will let you see it. There is something secretive
and hidden about this process. Our visit to a book pulping plant in the
Midlands takes almost a year to arrange: we are granted an interview
only after protracted negotiations, a series of deferrals and cancella-
tions, and a set of provisos. We are not allowed to name the plant,
specify its location, or name the manager who, seated opposite us in a
bare, bleak office, and with the constant background din of next door’s
shredding machines, tells us we are lucky to be here. Some years ago a
national newspaper wanted an article and pictures. When he refused
they hovered above the plant in a helicopter taking tele-photo snaps.
The plant is strategically unkempt to keep away visitors. ‘Nobody knows
what it is,’ he says. Partly the secrecy is cold, hard, business sense.
Books need to be destroyed or the market would collapse: returns or
surplus stock can’t leak out to be resold, so leftovers have to be shredded
securely. A ‘Certificate of Destruction’ proves the items no longer exist.
But there are other reasons, too, unspoken but palpable. Our visit is
treated with caution because the deliberate destruction of books is a
delicate issue. Publishers have their image to protect.
He speaks with animation about the world of ‘destruction work’.
He has no interest in the literary content of books – ‘Can’t read them.
They send me to sleep’ – but talks knowledgeably about their raw mate-
rial. He knows paper inside out. He understands its inner workings,
its complex variations of weight, grade and texture. He knows how it
is made and unmade; holding it up to the light he can show how the
fibres in a sheet of notepaper bind it together; he can tell by its taste
1
2 Gill Partington and Adam Smyth
if a banknote is made of genuine Cypriot white virgin pulp, and he

can talk at length about the construction and coatings of a cardboard
box. In the shredding plant, what matters is matter itself. In the bins
of books spending their final minutes of existence, the usual currency
of literature – content, plotline, character, style – no longer signifies. To
the outsider, the novelty may lie in spotting familiar authors or titles
and feeling the slight frisson as the big names – Jeffrey Archer, David
Baldacci, C. J. Samson, Tony Robinson – disappear into the noisy teeth
of the shredder. But these books are not here to be read. A handful of
workers in fluorescent jackets stand at tables, intently picking and sepa-
rating, removing staples from office waste, filleting the innards of hard-
backs, separating white from non-white pages. What demarcates these
books isn’t any kind of conventional criteria of literary judgement. The
sorting process is careful and expert, but isn’t to do with what’s printed
in them. This is a place where people look at books with different eyes,
not reading but grading, looking through the print to what is under-
neath. There’s a complex caste system: white letter grade, mechanical,
multi-grade, cardboard, then the lowest of the low: an abject pile of ‘wet
strength tissue’.
Confetti rains down from the shredding machines. Strewn every-
where on the floor is a babel of printed scraps: a non-stop factory of
literary recombination and experimentation. Pressed tight into 650 kilo
bales and stacked ready for delivery to paper mills, they are huge three-
dimensional cut-up poems, only their surfaces of tiny orphaned frag-
ments legible. We might think of the book as an object elevated above
other objects: we probably accord it a certain respect. We handle it
carefully, even reverentially, as we browse, fondle or covet in the book-
shop. But here, books know their place: they are part of a wider ecology
of destruction, recomposition and miscegenation. Books; cardboard;
toilet paper; office waste; files; receipts; and in a second warehouse
next door the non-paper waste: crates of bicycles; video cassettes. The
plant accepts Zimmer frames from Health Authorities, crushing 200 to
produce a ton of aluminium. The shredder is powerful, omnivorous,
indiscriminate. The baling machine, too. The foreman raises his right
hand with some pride to show where the baler snapped off his thumb
seven years ago. He had it stitched back on but it doesn’t move. ‘You’ve
got to respect these machines at the end of the day.’ More gruesome is
the story of a worker in another plant, down south. Working alone at
lunch he tumbled into the baler along with the shredded paper to reach
a grizzly rectangular end. These are places where boundaries erode and
disappear; not just boundaries between texts, but between things in
Introduction 3
general. Everything, it seems, is fibrous pulp to be manufactured into

something else. Used nappies are found in the DNA of ceiling tiles.
Scraps of Jeffrey Archer could become a Wisdom for the Ages, and a com-
puter manual could become Jeffrey Archer. And in the Ovidian lottery
of paper reincarnation, pretty much anything could end up as a lottery
ticket (Figures 0.1 and 0.2).
***
Figure 0.1 (photo: MacMillan)

In the business of books, production and destruction are linked. Their

shredding and pulping on a mass scale is a fact of life. Tens of thousands
of books meet this fate every week in the UK alone; the equivalent of
a small library. But, expressed in these terms, the reasons for the aura
of secrecy surrounding ‘destruction work’ start to become apparent.
The spectacle of industrial shredding brings to light some awkward
paradoxes. We have investments in the written word as a lasting
monument, yet its deliberate destruction is routine and even necessary.
Books are two-faced: on the one hand they are totems: carriers of cul-
ture, values, beliefs. But on the other hand they are quotidian objects:
material and ephemeral things, subject to decay and physical obsoles-
cence like any other. We weigh them down with significance out of
all proportion to their flimsy paper and cardboard construction. Their
destruction, too, is a material fact that is overloaded with symbolism.
It provokes unease, sometimes outrage or anger; even in some cases,
violence. In 2010, when the Florida Baptist preacher Pastor Terry Jones
announced his intention to burn 200 copies of the Quran, he provoked
a major international incident. The threat, though not executed, was
condemned by Hillary Clinton as a ‘disgraceful, disrespectful act’ and
was considered grave enough to warrant a personal intervention from
President Obama. A year later, Jones set fire to a single copy of the
Muslim holy book, sparking riots in Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan, in
which a UN compound was overrun and twelve were killed.1 Deaths
resulted also from reports that the Quran was put down a latrine by
interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. The reports, in Newsweek magazine,
turned out to be false, but at least 15 died in several days of rioting in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Indonesia.2 The desecration – or even
threatened desecration – of sacred texts has become a recurrent flash-
point in the religiously charged context of the so-called ‘war on terror’.
The destruction of secular books, too, can produce extreme reactions.
Protests against Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses had been
vocal but largely ignored immediately following the book’s publication.
But in January 1989, when a single copy was destroyed in front of TV
cameras on the streets of Bradford, it prompted a frenzy of indignation
in the press and media, and heated debates about free speech, multicul-
turalism and censorship. Anthony Burgess, writing in the Daily Mail,
condemned such ‘barbarous rituals’, warning the protesters to heed
the ‘prophetic words’ of the German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘If you burn
books, you will soon be burning men and women.’3 Burgess’s com-
ments point in two directions. On the one hand what concerns him is
book destruction as culturally backward, atavistic and barbaric, while
Introduction 5
on the other he draws parallels with a European context: the image

of a book in flames is an ominous sign because of its resonances with
Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. This rhetorical move seems an almost
universal response to the burning of books. The incineration of copies
of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in Drake, North Dakota in 1973,
on the order of a conservative school board, was condemned by one
local newspaper as a re-enactment of ‘the Nazis’ obscene book-burning
orgies in pre-World War II Germany’.4 The burning of Harry Potter novels
in a ‘holy bonfire’ in Almagordo, New Mexico was attended by protest-
ers waving placards comparing the perpetrators to Hitler. And a women’s
refuge in north-east England was pilloried in the press after announc-
ing the intention to burn the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey for its
endorsement of violence against women. Headlines drew direct compari-
sons with ‘1930s Germany’.5
Hovering inescapably in the background whenever books are burned
is the spectre of the book pyres in Berlin’s Opernplatz in 1933. On 10
May that year some 40,000 people, including propaganda minister Josef
Geobbels, gathered to watch as truckloads of ‘decadent’, ‘un-German’
books were burned by National Socialist students. Opernplatz, rechris-
tened Bebelplatz, is today an open air memorial to the conflagration. A
glass hatch set in the cobbled pavement reveals Micha Ullman’s ghostly
subterranean monument of empty bookshelves. Close by, rendered in
bronze, are the words of warning paraphrased by Anthony Burgess,
taken from Heinrich Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor: ‘Das war ein Vorspiel
nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch
Menschen’ (‘That was merely a prelude: Where they burn books, they
will ultimately burn people’). Bebelplatz bears witness not only to the
acts of the National Socialists, but also to our cultural investments in
the book. Given the scale of human suffering and death under the
Nazis, a solemn monument to the destruction of inanimate objects
seems in principle a strange gesture; disrespectful, even. But books
are different. Heine’s epigram underlines the fact that this is a monu-
ment to what have now become known as ‘the Nazi Book Burnings’,
but simultaneously to the Holocaust itself. In other words, it indicates
the extent to which the destruction of books is commemorated as an
integral part of the Nazi programme itself, the eradication of knowledge
and ideas anticipating and even facilitating an attempted eradication of
whole segments of society and culture.
Modern history’s most iconic and infamous episode of book destruc-
tion has come to define the terms by which we see all others. But this
automatic triangulation of Nazism, censorship and the burning of
the written word was a retrospective construction. Matthew Fishburn

shows that initial news coverage of the burnings reveals an interna-
tional reaction of bemusement rather than outrage. They were quickly
forgotten, ‘dismissed as a some sort of excessive college prank or sat-
urnalia’.6 The concept of book burning lacked its current immediate
associations with political repression. Conversely, in the inter-war
period it was a common trope in the writings of intellectuals eager to
break with the burden of literary tradition, gesturing towards libera-
tion rather than censorship. It carried a range of potential meanings,
but ‘this diversity has been elided in more recent history, replaced with
a sanitized version which imagines that book burning was instantly
recognised as the emblem of fascism’.7 In fact, Fishburn argues, it
wasn’t until nearly a decade after the conflagration in Berlin that the
link between book destruction and fascism began to be cemented. It
became a key facet of Allied propaganda, and the marker of a barbaric
enemy. George Orwell, in his wartime speeches, called book burning
‘the most characteristic activity of the Nazis’.8 American propaganda
films, meanwhile, made much of the burnings. MGM’s 1940 film This
Mortal Storm featured a set-piece based on the already familiar newsreel
footage of the Opernplatz burnings.9 Disney’s Education for Death, a
children’s film made in 1943, had its evil Nazis burning the Talmud,
the Quran, Shakespeare and the Bible, none of which made it onto the
actual Berlin bonfires.10
In the post-war decades it came to denote an affront to liberal, enlight-
ened values. Orwell’s 1984 has censored writings cast into the furnace
of the ‘memory hole’. And Ray Bradbury, wanting to conjure a vision of
a nightmarish future, chose book burning as the ultimate dystopian
motif. His 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, reflects various post-war anxie-
ties: the threat to liberty and free speech from McCarthyism and com-
munism, and the erosion of literature by popular culture. Yet these
diverse threats are given simultaneous expression in the burning of
books. Easily packaged as both a Cold War-friendly message about indi-
vidual freedom and as a humanist polemic about the value of reading,
Bradbury’s novel was quickly established as a fixture of the American
High School Literature curriculum, and brandished over subsequent
decades as a mobile and adaptable emblem of the dangers of censorship
and cultural vandalism more broadly. It reflected as well as perpetu-
ated the notion of book destruction as metonymic violence. A decade
later, François Truffaut’s film adaptation of the novel made much of the
visual iconography of totalitarianism. With its sinister black-uniformed
‘firemen’ ransacking homes and incinerating libraries, Truffaut’s film
Introduction 7
demonstrates the cultural legibility of book burning as a shorthand for

philistinism, intolerance and repression.
It has become a particularly ethically charged act. Heine’s lines,
engraved at book destruction’s ground zero, Bebelplatz, predate National
Socialism by more than a century, but they are now indivisibly associ-
ated with the Nazi burnings. By extension, they have become something
of a solemn mantra, invoked whenever the written word is threatened.
Those researching incidents of book destruction will find it more or less
everywhere they look, repeated with wearisome regularity. And its logic,
linking the fate of books with the fate of human beings, goes largely
unquestioned. It implies not just an inevitability – the destruction of
one will lead to the destruction of the other – but a kind of continuity
and even a moral equivalence: the one is part of the other. It seems that
book destruction has become so inextricably linked with brutality, that
we think of it as an act of brutality in itself.
This coupling has of course a long history: in Areopagitica (1644), John
Milton declared ‘as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills
a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a
good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God’.11 But this link
between book destruction and murder is cemented in the second half
of the twentieth century through an association with political repres-
sion and barbarism. The sentiment is one Ray Bradbury makes explicit
in the 1967 introduction to his novel: ‘when Hitler burned a book I felt it
as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of
history they are one in the same flesh’.12 A similar belief seems to underlie
Rebecca Knuth’s term ‘libricide’, which yokes together the pillaging of
libraries with regime-sponsored acts of genocide.13 The two are continuous,
she argues, in her recent studies of politically motivated book destruc-
tion. Books are weapons in an ongoing conflict in which the stakes are
high: ‘The history of modern book and library destruction is one of a col-
lision between liberal humanists and extremists.’14 The lines are drawn
between defenders of the book and those who seek to destroy it.
But there is another story to be told here, lost among such overheated
rhetoric. The dominance of this narrative which links book destruction
with the violation of ‘civilization itself’, and which describes (and also
often prescribes) a sense of ‘deep emotion … sadness and fear’ clouds out
other ways of thinking.15 This collection of essays brings to light myriad
contexts in which books have been torn, cut, burned, erased, pulped,
repurposed, adapted and reshaped. It suggests that the destruction of
books has historically been widespread and varied, its motivations com-
plex, and its ethics far from black and white. It has not solely been the
preserve of religious zealots and repressive governments, and nor has

it inevitably connoted violence or aggression. The chapters in this vol-
ume draw connections instead between book destruction and creativity,
and uncover a wide range of practices, undertaken in diverse contexts
and for different ends. A surprising new picture emerges of a vibrant
alternative history and taxonomy, providing an important corrective to
conventional assessments which only lament destruction as creativity’s
dark opposite.
Much attention has been given in recent years to what Leah Price
calls the ‘material affordances’ of books. Price’s own How to Do Things
with Books is something of a recent landmark in this field, address-
ing the multitude of unexpected uses to which the printed word has
historically been put.16 She demonstrates how the Victorian book was
used as trophy, tool, and furniture, focusing on what readers did with
printed objects as well as – or instead of – reading them. The mate-
rial turn, taking place at the intersection of book history and literary
scholarship, has opened up a number of other new perspectives on the
written text.17 Attention has shifted to paratext and margins, as schol-
ars decode readerly marginalia as signs of material use.18 The physical
book has been approached through its manufacture, trade, circulation,
its commodification and concomitant anxieties.19 The interrelations
of the book and the gendered, medicalised reading body have been
explored, as has the impact of the closets, railway carriages and librar-
ies that transformed the physical spaces readers occupied.20 From the
German perspective of Mediawissenschaft, literature has been situated as
part of a wider ‘discourse network’ of writing technologies, bureaucratic
paperwork, card catalogues and postal systems.21 And in perhaps the
ultimate material gesture, critics have looked beneath the print, to the
papery substrate of books.22 Far from heralding the end of the book the
digital era has meant, for scholarship at least, its noticeable, insistent
and vividly embodied reappearance.
Yet its destruction has been, until now, largely uncharted territory,
and this significant aspect of the material life of the book has thus been
omitted from the account. Modes of book destruction are as varied and
fascinating as its production and circulation. The book’s misuse can be
as enlightening as its use. Destruction is a unique moment when the
boundaries around the book become especially permeable and dissolve
entirely; when it transforms itself into matter, is recycled into another
book, or becomes some other kind of object. It is a moment when the
complex nature of the book becomes especially visible, and when the
fraught relationship between its insides and outside – its materiality
Introduction 9
and its semiotic content – is most urgently felt. Beyond this, however,
there are still more far-reaching issues of disciplinary perspective and
theory. Work in the Humanities in past decades has centred around the
authority of the printed word. A pervasive Foucauldian literary history
has seen the library as a nexus of power, an archive of medical, legal
discourses that have the capacity to shape and discipline selfhood and
thought. Roger Chartier’s influential concept of an ‘order of books’ simi-
larly designates not only the way in which books come to be organised,
but the role they in turn play in organising and codifying systems of
discourse.23 The making of books and knowledge is linked. But what
of un-making? Books are not always treated with reverence or respect,
as emblems of cultural authority, after all. Often they are treated with
disregard, carelessness or violence. How might these instances impact
on existing paradigms of knowledge, power and subjectivity?
Looking back to the medieval and early modern period, this collection
uncovers books routinely scribbled on and scattered, lining pie dishes
and wrapping vegetables, suggesting that the book might be something
quite different to the stable, coherent textual object that we now take
for granted. In subsequent centuries, any putative monolithic ‘order of
books’ is constantly undercut by both the reality and representation of
the book’s ephemerality, its physical disintegration into waste matter. The
essays in this volume trace not only this rich cultural history, but also
address an increasingly widespread strain of art practice based on the cre-
ative transformations of the book. The digital age in particular seems to
have generated a renewed fascination with the book as a material object
to be adapted, reshaped and physically modified. The collection engages
with the lively field of contemporary book art through interviews with
three leading practitioners, as well as an article on the aesthetics and eth-
ics of the ‘altered book’. It seems that we are witnessing, if not a renais-
sance of the book itself, then certainly a renaissance of book destruction.
***
The five sections in this collection each present paradigmatic mecha-

nisms of destruction: ‘Burning’; ‘Mutilating’; ‘Doctoring’; ‘Degrading’;
and ‘Deforming/Reshaping’. The volume opens with that most cul-
turally recognisable episode: the Nazi burnings of ‘degenerate’ texts.
However, Heike Bauer’s chapter uncovers an unexpected ambivalence
to the burnings, linked to a transnational discourse of homophobia.
She focuses on the Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin, established by
Jewish homosexual rights campaigner and trained physician Magnus
Figure 0.2 (photo: Gill Partington)
Hirschfeld. Central to the establishment of modern sexology, the

Institute was a prime target for Nazi attack, and in May 1933, its books
were set alight on Berlin’s opera square. Bauer retraces these events and
considers their Anglo-American responses, showing that debates about
books, homosexuality and destruction were closely aligned for many
commentators, who overtly associated Hirschfeld’s work with his own
homosexuality in discursive bids that effectively dismissed his contri-
butions and implicitly condoned their obliteration. Adam Smyth, too
reveals some unexpected attitudes to the burning of books. He consid-
ers the productive, rather than destructive, place of conflagration in
early modern writing and reading, using the accidental burning of Ben
Jonson’s treasured library as a starting point. Jonson’s response was
to commemorate this loss with more writing. But if his lost works-in-
progress live on in his verse, perhaps more richly than they ever did in
reality, it is partly because early modern literary culture often posited a
connection between destruction and literary excellence. Good writing
was a burning away of bad texts, and to read well was to produce textual
loss. Destruction was writing’s (often silent) partner.
Introduction 11
Gill Partington and Ross Birrell address in different ways the mutila-
tion and violent treatment of the written word. Both resist the tendency
to see brutality towards books as a symbolic attack on culture itself, and
instead explore its meanings as a mode of artistic practice. Partington
examines the work of the radical British artist John Latham, whose
career was a sustained attack on the book, astonishing in its range of
methods, from burning to cutting and chewing. She situates these acts
firstly in the framework of Latham’s theories of time, event and percep-
tion, and secondly in a technological context. Latham’s real interest was
in the book’s place in a changing media ecology, and its collision with
film. Glasgow-based artist Ross Birrell is similarly diverse in his modes
of book mutilation, which include burning, sawing in half, grating and
throwing books into the sea. His work explores the relationship, and the
tension, between book destruction as symbol, and as literal act. How
does the bathos of actual book burning – which is difficult, slow, often
unspectacular – complicate the intense cultural taboo of the burnt book,
for instance? What happens to this potent symbolism of the destroyed
book when we try to enact that destruction?
Anthony Bale and Tom Phillips both reflect on defacing the page
as a productive rather than destructive impulse. Bale examines a late
fifteenth-century manuscript doctored by one Dorothy Helbarton,
an early sixteenth-century owner of the book. Bale argues that these
inscriptions stage a remarkable attempt at defacing the book in order
to foreground its pragmatic, material worth, as opposed to the intel-
lectual and antiquarian worth of the book as indicated by other own-
ers. Her attempts to mark and damage the book reflect an urge to lay
claim to it but they also change the nature of the book by distracting
the reader from the body-text to the parallel narrative of ownership in
the margins. Helbarton’s ludic mini-narrative exists alongside the main
text, anticipating in many ways the work of Tom Phillips, a writer and
artist who has created a new work out of doctoring an existing novel.
For nearly 50 years, Phillips has been overwriting and illustrating the
pages of W. H. Mallock’s Victorian melodrama, A Human Document,
obscuring the majority of the text to leave visible a trickle of words. In
the process he has constructed a new narrative entirely; a form of liter-
ary composition based on the act of erasing text. In this wide-ranging
and often hilarious interview, Phillips discusses the production of
A Humument, his ongoing dialogue with Mallock, and the relationship
between defacement, destruction and creativity in his work.
Chapters by Stephen Colclough and Heather Tilley consider the
degradation of the book through its usage, its rough treatment at the
hands of both over-enthusiastic readers and under-enthusiastic ones.

Colclough looks firstly at book abuse in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, suggesting that as the novel took on
new cultural power in the mid-Victorian period, authors increasingly
imagined the readerly abuse of reference works and theological texts. In
part, this desecration of authoritative texts symbolises the triumph of
the novel over more respectable genres, but it also reveals deep-seated
authorial anxieties about obedience. Colclough links this to a further
set of cultural anxieties surrounding the ephemeral nature of books,
and the way that popular novels of Mudie’s circulating library were
frequently ‘read to death’. More attention needs to be paid to popular
objects that have failed to reach traditional research archives because
they often disintegrated through use. Heather Tilley also addresses the
theme of ephemerality and Victorian print culture, through the motifs
of book production in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. The novel is preoc-
cupied both with reading and with the impermanency of the material
world, she argues, but whilst its recurrent scenes of burial and waste
have clearly lent themselves to psychoanalytic readings, she focuses
instead on how they connect with contemporary practices of deal-
ing with the surplus of unwanted books, via either disposal or selling
as recyclable material. Such practices suggest a complex relationship
between literary value and material form, with novels turned to waste
paper or even manure as tastes waned. Contrary to the plenitude of
its own publishing mode, the scenes of decomposition which haunt
Dickens’s novel testify to a preoccupation with the issue of literary sur-
vival and degeneration.
Kate Flint and Nicola Dale provide an appropriate end point for this
volume, suggesting the overlap between book destruction and a surpris-
ing kind of recycling. Both reflect in differing ways on the repurposing
and reshaping of books into new forms. In ‘The Aesthetics of Book
Destruction’, Kate Flint begins by discussing why photographs of dam-
aged books are not only powerful, and can shock with their wanton
destruction of all that a book symbolises, but can also give pleasure.
Flint considers such images in connection with the aesthetics of ruina-
tion, and the connections between ruins and apocalypse. This anxiety –
that books may be an endangered form – is also expressed in the work of
contemporary artists who seek to explore the cultural meanings of the
book, and expand its potential as an object. She discusses the work of a
number of practitioners from the United States and Britain, suggesting
that the appeal of these creatively destroyed books may be approached
through what Svetlana Boym terms a ‘critical ruin gaze’, one that looks
Introduction 13
not to the past, but to the future. Nicola Dale is one such book artist,
whose delicate works are made by painstakingly slicing and sculpting
intricate forms from old books. In her works the book assumes striking
new shapes, but the original text often remains partially legible, so that
the result both is, and yet is no longer, a book. Dale’s work seems to
play ingeniously with the boundary between destruction and creation,
and also between book and sculpture, inviting speculation about what
distinguishes the two. In this interview, she elaborates on the practical
processes involved in producing her ‘altered books’, as well as the wider
implications of transforming book into art object.
Notes
1. Enayat Najafizada and Rod Nordland, ‘Afghans Avenge Florida Koran
Burning, Killing 12’, The New York Times, 1 April 2011, section World / Asia
Pacific <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/asia/02afghanistan.
html> [accessed 29 November 2013].
2. Howard Kurtz, ‘Newsweek Apologizes’, The Washington Post, 16 May 2005,
section Nation <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti-
cle/2005/05/15/AR2005051500605.html> [accessed 29 November 2013].
3. Anthony Burgess, ‘The Burning Truth’, The Daily Mail, 21 January 1989.
4. ‘North Dakota Book Burning Nazi Style’, Lodi News-Sentinel, 20 November
1973, p. 6.
5. ‘A Women’s Refuge Is to Burn Copies of 50 Shades of Grey …Sorry, but Have
I Woken up in 1930s Germany?’, Mail Online <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
debate/article-2193026/A-womens-refuge-burn-copies-50-Shades-Grey--
sorry-I-woken-1930s-Germany.html> [accessed 29 November 2013].
6. Matthew Fishburn, Burning Books (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
p. 44.
7. Fishburn, Burning Books, p. 73.
8. George Orwell, ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, p. 505. The original
broadcast was made on 21 May 1941 (quoted in Fishburn, Burning Books,
pp. 99–100).
11. The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannigan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998),
p. 1005.
12. Quoted in Diane S. Wood, ‘Bradbury and Atwood: Exile as Rational Decision’,
Fahrenheit 451: New Edition (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008), p. 44.
13. Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and
Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Westport: Praeger, 2003).
14. Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and
Cultural Destruction (Westport: Praeger, 2006).
15. Knuth, Libricide, p. 1. There is a small body of work on book destruction,
most of which focuses, understandably, on the theme of irretrievable cul-
tural loss. See, for example, James Raven’s collection, Lost Libraries: The
Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke and New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). One exception is Fernando Baez and Alfred
J. MacAdam, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer
to Modern Iraq (New York: Atlas & Co./W. W. Norton, 2008), which provides
a wide-ranging historical survey.
16. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012).
17. See, for example, D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Text
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); D. F. McKenzie, Making
Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald
and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Cambridge MA: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2002); John N. King (ed.), Tudor Books and the Material Construction of
Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
18. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance Books
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
19. See Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and
the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in
Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); James
Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–
1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Patrick Brantlinger, The
Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
20. See, for example, Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914, new edn.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel:
Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007); Stephen Colclough, ‘Representing Reading Spaces’,
in Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed (eds), The History of Reading:
Volume 3 – Methods, Tactics, Strategies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), pp. 99–114.
21. This approach emerges out of media theory rather than literary studies. See
Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1992); Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of
the Postal System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Markus
Krajewski and Peter Krapp, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–
1929 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
22. See Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Craig Dworkin, No
Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
23. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe
Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1994).
Part I
Burning
1
Burning Sexual Subjects: Books,
Homophobia and the Nazi
Destruction of the Institute
of Sexual Science in Berlin
Heike Bauer
The Nazi book burnings are one of the defining moments both in
the modern history of the book and twentieth-century history more
broadly. Historians of Nazism have paid considerable attention to their
role in the escalation of Nazi terror and its Anglo-American reception.1
Other critiques of violence and hatred have similarly turned to the
events of 1933 to ask what it is, to borrow the words of Rebecca Knuth,
‘about texts and libraries that puts them in the line of fire during social
conflict?’2 Knuth answers her own question by pointing to the crucial
role of books in collective identity formation and its sustenance. ‘As the
voice and memory of the targeted group’, she argues, ‘books and librar-
ies are central to culture and identity [and] vital in sustaining a group’s
uniqueness’.3 For Knuth and many other critics, books are the material
correlative of an established cultural identity, and book burnings con-
stitute the attempt to eradicate it. This line of investigation, which has
productively examined the symbolism of burning books – including
the fact that it has a limited function as an act of censorship – tends to
focus on the losses incurred in the act of destruction. In contrast, I want
to turn attention to the remains: the documents and objects which
survived the Nazi attack on books in the raid on Magnus Hirschfeld’s
(1868–1935) Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin.
The Institute’s library was the first point of attack in the series of
events that have become known as the Nazi book burnings. As a centre
of medico-scientific sexological research, it contributed to the produc-
tion of a modern understanding of sexuality, while the Institute’s public
activities and political campaigning for the decriminalisation of homo-
sexuality shaped an unusually affirmative space for queer culture in
Berlin. There is some critical consensus that the Institute’s association,
via its founder, with both homosexuality and Jewishness, explains why
17
18 Heike Bauer
it was the first place to be raided in the Nazi attack against books.4 Yet
while historians of sexuality have rightly pointed out that the upsurge
of violence against books was propelled by homophobia as well as anti-
Semitism,5 many broader histories of the book burnings tend to dismiss
the importance of homophobia as an analytical category.6 By examin-
ing the remnants that remained undestroyed in the events of May 1933,
this chapter turns fresh attention to the homophobic underpinnings of
the Nazi attack against Hirschfeld’s Institute and its reception. It shows
how the materiality of the books and papers under attack influenced
how they were handled, and considers why and how some objects –
notably a collection of questionnaires and a bronze statue – survived the
events. The chapter argues that while an examination of the symbolism
of the book burnings tells us something about the psychic structures
that made these hateful acts appear necessary for the Nazi claim on
power, the remnants that survived these events reveal how homopho-
bia shaped the book burnings and their reception.
Books and bodies at the Institute of Sexual Science
Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in July

1919 with the aim of building a space for ‘research, teaching, healing,
and refuge’ that could ‘free the individual from physical ailments, psy-
chological afflictions, and social deprivation’.7 The Institute was housed
in the imposing former home of the German ambassador to France,
which had been bought by Hirschfeld during the reshuffling of political
power and property in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.
Around the same time, Hirschfeld also set up the Magnus-Hirschfeld-
Foundation, a charitable organisation that would – together with
donations from anonymous private supporters and Hirschfeld himself –
provide the necessary funding for the Institute’s many activities. The
Institute became most famous for Hirschfeld’s work on homosexual-
ity and cross-dressing – he coined the term ‘transvestism’ in 1910.8
However, it supported a much wider range of activities including sex
and marriage counselling services, the provision of sexual health clinics,
advice on contraception and the development of medical, anthropolog-
ical and psychological research on all aspects of gender and sexuality.9
In addition, it provided office space for feminist activists, sex reform
journals and organisations such as the influential World League for
Sexual Reform, which had been co-founded by Hirschfeld in 1921.10 Life
at the Institute was characterised by the blurring of boundaries between
professional and private space as it offered living accommodation for
Another random document with
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America.” “The North American ambassador so meanly dressed!”
exclaimed the lady. “Hush, madam, for Heaven’s sake!” whispered
the gentleman; “he is the man that bottles up thunder and lightning!”
I suppose my readers all know that Dr. Franklin was the inventor of
lightning-rods, by which the lightning is drawn off from buildings, and
thus rendered harmless. It was this that gave rise to the humorous
reply of the aforesaid gentleman.
Ingenious Excuse of a Schoolboy.—A country schoolmaster

once having the misfortune to have his schoolhouse burnt down,
was obliged to remove to a new one, where he reprimanded one of
his boys, who mis-spelled a number of words, by telling him that he
did not spell as well as when he was in the old schoolhouse. “Well,
thome how or other,” said the urchin with a scowl, “I can’t ethackly
get the hang of thith ere thkoolhouth.”
Keen Satire.—“You saved my life on one occasion,” said a

beggar to a captain under whom he had served. “Saved your life!”
replied the officer; “do you think that I am a doctor?” “No,” answered
the man, “but I served under you in the battle of ——, and when you
ran away, I followed, and thus my life was preserved.”
Talking To One’s Self.—Earl Dudley possessed in a remarkable

degree the unpleasant habit of talking to himself. On one occasion
he was driving his cabriolet across Grosvenor Square, in London, in
his way to Park Lane, when he overtook an acquaintance of the
name of Luttrell. It was raining quite fast, and his lordship good-
naturedly invited the pedestrian to ride. They drove on till they had
nearly arrived at Lord Dudley’s mansion, where, Mr. Luttrell giving no
hint of wishing to alight, the Earl unconsciously exclaimed aloud,
what many would have thought under similar circumstances, “Plague
on this fellow; I suppose I must ask him to dine with me!” How often,
instead of flattering speeches and soothing compliments, should we
hear unpleasant and reproachful remarks, if people were in the habit
of thinking aloud, like Lord Dudley.
Being Behindhand.—An idle fellow complained bitterly of his

hard lot, and said, that he was born on the last day of the year, the
last day of the month, and the last day of the week, and he had
always been behindhand. He believed it would have been a hundred
dollars in his pocket if he had not been born at all!
Aphorisms from Shakspeare.

A heart unspotted is not easily daunted.
One drunkard doth love another of the name.
Do not cast away an honest man for a villain’s accusation.
All offences come from the heart.
Every cloud engendereth not a storm.
Ignorance is the curse of God—knowledge the wing wherewith we
fly to heaven.
He is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man.
There’s small choice in rotten apples.
SPRING IS COMING! A SONG.
the words and music composed for
merry’s museum.
Tell me, snow wreath, tell me why

Thou dost steal away so sly,
Why up-on the hill to-day,
But to-mor-row gone a-way?
“Spring is coming, spring is coming!”
Tell me, blue-bird, tell me why

Art thou seen in yonder sky,
Pouring music from above,
In a lay that’s all of love?
“Spring is coming—spring is coming!”
3
Tell me, foaming, romping rill,
Dashing headlong down the hill,
Why, like boy from school let out,
Dost thou leap, and laugh, and shout?
Tell me, little daisy, tell

Why in yonder wooded dell
Forth you venture from the ground,
Mid the sere leaves all around?
ROBERT MERRY’S MUSEUM.
My own Life and Adventures.
(Continued from page 35.)
CHAPTER VI.
My new Gun.—Obstinacy.—Setting out on a Hunting Expedition.—A
Strange Character.—Mountain Sport.—A Snow-Storm.—
Getting lost.—Serious Adventures.
I have said enough as to the indulgent manner in which I was

treated at my uncle’s, not only by him, but by others, to show that no
very great restraints were laid upon my wishes, or even my caprices.
At the time, I thought it very pleasant to be permitted to have my own
way; but I have since been led to believe that most of the serious
evils of my life have flowed from this defect in my early education.
We all of us need to be brought up to follow duty rather than
pleasure, or, to speak more properly, to find our pleasure in doing
our duty. If parents send their children to school, it is the duty of their
children not only to go, but to improve all the advantages offered
them. It is their duty to learn their lessons well and thoroughly, and to
obey the rules of the school; and children that are properly educated,
and who have right feelings, will do this with cheerfulness and
satisfaction. Thus they will find pleasure in following the path of duty.
This is very important for the happiness of children, while they are
children,—for there is no pleasure so sweet as that which is found in
doing something useful and right; but it is still more important in
another point of view. In early life, we form habits, and they are likely
to guide us ever after. It is easy for us to act according to habit, and it
is difficult for us to act otherwise. A child who is brought up in the
habit of finding pleasure in doing his duty, is likely to go on so
through life; and thus he will secure happiness in this world and that
which is to come: while a child who is brought up without a sense of
duty, and at the same time is permitted to follow his fancy, is apt
always to be guided rather by his whims, his caprices, and his
passions, than by any right feeling or right principle. Such a person is
almost sure to meet with much trouble in life, and there is great
danger that he will turn out an unhappy and unfortunate man.
Now I was brought up in this manner, and though my uncle
intended me the greatest kindness by his system of indulgence, it
was, in point of fact, the most mischievous that could have been
devised. I grew up headstrong and passionate, and though my
temper was naturally good, it seemed rather to be injured than
benefited by the manner in which I was treated. I could not bear
anything that thwarted my wishes. I was very easily offended, and
became selfish, unreasonable, and unjust, in proportion as I was
petted and flattered. Thus it happened in my case, as it always
happens, that having my own way made me what is called a spoiled
child; and accordingly, I became disagreeable to myself and almost
everybody else.
I am particular in telling all this for two reasons:—first, to show to
parents, that if they do not wish their children to be miserable and
disagreeable—if they do not wish to lay the foundation of
selfishness, caprice, and injustice in the hearts of their offspring—let
them govern their children, make them mind, make them do right. If
parents do not wish to have their children ruined, let them avoid a
system of indulgence. My other reason for giving these details is,
that I hope to persuade children to do their duty cheerfully, because
this is really the best, the happiest way. It is not only the best for the
future, but the present; not only best in view of manhood, but for
childhood itself.
I am now going to relate some circumstances, which will illustrate
some things I have been saying. It will show not only how much my
temper had been injured, but into what evils a thoughtless and
headstrong youth will rush, if given up to his own guidance.
On a certain day in January, it had been agreed between Bill
Keeler and myself, that we would proceed to the mountain for the
purpose of hunting. My uncle had bought me a new fowling-piece,
and on this occasion I was to take it with me. I looked forward to the
day with great impatience, and when at last it arrived, Bill and myself
were up by day-break, ready to depart. The winter had thus far been
remarkably mild and open. There was as yet no snow on the ground.
But when we were about to leave the house on our expedition, my
uncle, who had been out of doors, told us that it was going to snow,
and we had better not venture among the mountains. I was
immediately angry at this advice, and told my uncle that I would go,
whether he thought it best or not. With more than ordinary spirit, he
replied that I should not go! This resistance set me in a blaze. I
seized my gun, uttered some words of defiance, and rushed out of
the house. Finding me thus determined and incorrigible, my yielding
uncle told Bill, who stood still all the time, seeming to know how it
would turn out, to go with me, and take good care of me.
Accordingly, he soon joined me, and we went on together, laughing
heartily at the scene which had just passed.
We soon reached the forests that lay at the foot of the mountain,
and while it was yet somewhat dark, we began to climb up the
ledges. As we were passing through a small copse of tall trees
without underwood, I heard the step of something near by, and
immediately discovered a dark object passing slowly on before me. I
drew up my piece, and was on the point of firing, when Bill struck
down the barrel of my gun, and exclaimed, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t
fire!—it’s Old Sarah!” This was said and done in season to prevent
my shooting the object at which I aimed, but not to stop the
discharge of my firelock. The shot struck the ground at the very feet
of my companion, thus coming very near taking his life.
The noise of my gun aroused the attention of the singular old
woman, whom, with the ardor of a youthful hunter, I had taken for a
wild-cat or a wolf. She turned round, and began to speak in a
warning voice. “Go back!” said she, at the pitch of her lungs, “go
back! for the snow is already falling, and you will both get lost in the
woods. In one hour the paths will be covered, and then you cannot
find your way among the mountains!”
Bill and I both laughed at all this, and I am sorry to say that we
returned the kind anxiety of the old woman for our safety, with jeers
and gibes. “Take care of yourself! and we will take care of
ourselves,” said I. “Keep your breath to cool your porridge,” said Bill.
With this and similar impertinence, we passed up the acclivity,
leaving the decrepit old woman to climb the mountain as she might.
I had seen this personage before, and had heard something of
her story; but I was now curious to know more. Accordingly, I asked
Bill about her, and he proceeded to tell me all that was known of her
character and history. She was a native of Long Island, and during
the war of the Revolution had become attached to a British officer,
who was stationed there. He wronged her cruelly, and then deserted
her. With a mind somewhat bewildered, she wandered into the
country, and took up her abode in a cave of the very mountain we
were now ascending. Here she had lived for years, visiting the
villages in the vicinity in the open seasons, but retiring to her den
and subsisting on nuts and roots, during the winter. Many wild stories
were told of her. It was said that she had lived so long in the
mountain, that the foxes had become familiar with her, and would
come and lick her hands. It was said the crows would sit on her
head, and the rattlesnakes coil in her lap. Beside all these tales, it
was said that “Old Sarah,” as she was called, was a witch, and many
persons declared that they had seen her just at dark, or before a
thunder-storm, flying through the air on a broomstick.
Bill’s narrative was cut short by the sudden whizzing of a partridge
from a bush just before me. Another and another soon followed.
These creatures are very cunning. They are always on the watch,
and when they hear or see any one coming, they get on the opposite
side of some rock, or thicket, or tree, and remain concealed till the
person comes near. Then they burst away with a startling, rushing
sound, taking good care to keep the rock, or tree, or thicket between
them and their enemy, until they are at a distance.
At least a dozen of these fine birds broke away from their cover,
but neither Bill nor myself had a chance for a shot. So we went on,
greatly excited, however, by the game we had seen. It was not long
before we met with another covey of partridges, and firing at random,
I killed one of them. Great was my exultation, for I had never killed a
partridge before; and beside, I had shot it with my new gun; and,
more than all, Bill, who was expert at every kind of sport, had as yet
met with no success. As I picked up the large and beautiful bird, still
fluttering and whirling round in my hand, and held it forth to my
companion, I imagine that I felt of as much consequence as
Bonaparte did when he had conquered the Austrians in the famous
field of Austerlitz.
Excited by this triumph of skill and my new gun, we continued to
push forward, though it was now snowing fast; and the ground was
already covered to the depth of two or three inches. Frequently
meeting with some kind of game, though we got little of it, we
traversed one ridge after another, until we were involved in a sea of
small and thickly wooded ridges and ravines, that crowned the top of
the mountain. Scarcely heeding the course we took, or thinking of
return, we proceeded for several hours. At last we came to a small
hill, and it was agreed between Bill and myself that he should take
the valley on one side, and I on the other, and we would meet
beyond it.
I had not gone far before a rabbit rushed by me with prodigious
bounds, and entered a thicket at a little distance. I followed it, but as
I approached, it plunged farther into the bushes. Intent upon the
pursuit, and guided by its footsteps in the snow, I pursued it from
place to place, from thicket to thicket, but without being able to get a
shot at it. At last it disappeared amid a heap of stones. As these
were loose and not large, I began to pull them away, expecting every
moment to reach the object of my pursuit. But after working here for
some time, I was obliged to give up the effort in despair, and leaving
the place, I set out to join my companion. So intent had I been upon
my object, that I had not marked my route or noticed the lapse of
time. As soon as I began to think of joining him, however, I became
conscious that I had gone a considerable distance out of my way,
and had spent a long time in the chase of the rabbit. I therefore
proceeded with as much rapidity as the rugged nature of the ground
and the dense forest would allow, and in the direction, as I
supposed, toward the extremity of the ridge, where Bill and I were to
meet.
It was not long, however, before I became assured that I had lost
my way—and that, instead of approaching the point designated, I
had wandered a great way from it. I now began to retrace my steps,
and for a time was guided by my tracks in the snow. But the storm
had set in in earnest. The large flakes fell thick and fast, filling the air
with a dense cloud, and seeming to pour down upon the earth as if
shovelled from some reservoir in the skies. In a few minutes after I
had passed along, my tracks were completely covered up, and no
trace of them could be seen.
My situation was now serious, and I began to consider what was
to be done. The advice of my uncle came to my mind, and the
warning of the grizzly old woman crept over me with a sort of
shudder. I fired my gun, hoping to make Bill hear it, and waited in
breathless anxiety for a reply. But the wind was roaring in the tops of
the tall trees, and neither the mountain nor the tempest seemed to
heed my distress, any more than if I had been an insect. I was never
in my life so struck with my utter helplessness. I was not accustomed
to take care of myself. In any difficulty heretofore, I had hitherto
always found some one to extricate me. But I was now alone. No
one was here to aid me. At first I gave way to despair. I threw my
gun to the ground in a pet, and lay down myself, and with bitter
lamentations bewailed my fate. But the gray, gnarled old trees and
sturdy rocks around took not the slightest notice of my distress. I
fancied that I could almost see them smile at my vain wailings. They
did not, at any rate, rush to my relief, and soothe my agony. For
once, I was obliged to rely upon myself; and it was a stern lesson,
which I have never forgotten.
After a few moments, I rose from the ground, brushed off the
snow from my clothes, and began seriously to devise some plan of
action. But here, again, my habit of dependence came in my way.
Little accustomed to think or act for myself in any emergency, I was a
poor hand for contrivance. My convenient friend, Bill Keeler, had
been accustomed always to save me the trouble of making any
mental or bodily exertion. O how ardently did I now wish that he was
with me! How did I fill the mountain with cries of his name! But there
was no return. Even the throat of the mountain, that had ever before
been so ready with its echoes, was now choked up with the
thickening shower of snow. Nothing could be heard but one
deafening roar of the gale, chafing the uneasy tops of the trees.
I concluded to set out in what seemed to me the direction of my
home, and to push straight forward till I was extricated from the wilds
of the mountain. I began to put this scheme in execution, and for
more than an hour I plodded on through the woods. I proceeded with
considerable rapidity for a time, but the snow was now a foot in
depth, and as it impeded my progress, so it diminished my strength. I
was, at length, obliged to slacken my pace, and finally, being
completely wearied out, I sat down beneath the branches of a large
hemlock tree, to rest myself. This spot was so sheltered by the
thickly woven branches as to be free from snow, and here I
continued for some time. When I got up to proceed, I found my limbs
so stiffened that it was difficult for me to move. At the same time a
dizziness came over me, and I fell to the ground.
It was not till the next day that I had any consciousness of
existence. When I awoke, I was in a dark, rocky cavern, with a
grizzly old woman by my side. At first, I fancied it all to be some
strange dream, and expected to awake and find myself in my
comfortable bed at my uncle’s. But pretty soon, remembrances of
the preceding day came back, and guessing at the truth, I asked—“Is
that you, Sarah?” “It is me,” said the old woman; “and you are in my
cave.” “And you have saved my life, then?” said I, half rising from my
recumbent position. “Yes—yes,” said she; “I found you beneath the
hemlock, and I brought you here. But you must be quiet, for you
have suffered, and need care and rest.”
I need not attempt to tell how gratefully I thanked the poor old
hermitess, and how I begged pardon for my impertinence on the
preceding morning. I then began to inquire about other things—the
depth of the snow; whether anything was known of my companion;
and how and when I could return to my uncle. In reply, I was told that
there was at least four feet of snow on the ground; that it was
therefore impossible to attempt to leave the cave; that Bill Keeler,
being an expert woodsman, had no doubt found his way home; and
that in all probability I was given up by my friends as lost.
I was obliged to be content with this recital, though it left me much
cause of anxiety, especially on account of my companion, for whom I
entertained a sincere affection. Being, however, in some degree
pacified, I began to consider my condition. Here I was, in a cave
formed by nature in a rock, and my only companion was a gray old
dame, her long hair almost as white as the snow-drift, her form bent,
her eyes bleared and colorless, her face brown and wrinkled. Beside
all this, she was esteemed a witch, and while feared and shunned by
mankind, she was regarded as the familiar companion of the wild fox
and the rattlesnake.
Nor was this all that rendered my situation singular. There was no
fire in the place I inhabited, yet, strange to say, I did not suffer from
the cold. Nor were there any articles of furniture. The only food that
was given to me consisted of butternuts and walnuts, with a little
dried beef and bread which Old Sarah had brought from the village.
For two days and two nights I remained at this place, the greater
part of the time lying upon the bottom of the cave on my back, with
only a ray of light admitted through the cleft of the rock, which served
as a door, and which was partially closed by two large pieces of
bark. On the third day I was looking from the mouth of the cave upon
the scene around, when I saw a figure at a considerable distance,
attempting to make its way through the snow, in the direction of the
cave. At first sight I knew it to be Bill Keeler! I clambered upon the
top of a rock, and shouted with all my might. I was soon discovered,
and my shout was answered by Bill’s well-known voice. It was a
happy moment for us both. I threw up my arms in ecstasy, and Bill
did the same, jumping up and down in the deep snow, as if he were
light as a feather. He continued to work his way toward us, and in
half an hour we were in each other’s arms. For a short time I thought
the fellow was stark mad. He rolled in the snow as you sometimes
see an overjoyed and frisky dog—then he exclaimed, “I told ’em so! I
told ’em so! I knew we should find you here!” Then the poor fellow
got up, and looking me in the face, burst into an uncontrollable fit of
tears.
I was myself deeply affected, and Old Sarah’s eyes, that had
seemed dry with the scorching of sorrow and time, were now
overflowing. When I noticed her sympathy, however, she shrunk from
notice, and retired to her cave. Bill then related all that had
happened; how he hunted for me on the mountain till midnight, and
then, with a broken heart, went home for help; how he had since
toiled for my discovery and deliverance, and how, against the
expectations of everybody, he had a sort of presentiment that I
should be found in the shelter of Old Sarah’s cave. He farther told
me that my uncle and four men were coming, and would soon be
with us.
I need not give the details of what followed. It is enough to say,
that my uncle soon arrived, with sufficient assistance to take me
home, though the depth of the snow rendered it exceedingly difficult
to proceed. I left Old Sarah with abundant thanks, and an offer of
money, which, however, she steadily refused. At last I reached
home. Not a word was said to remind me of my obstinacy and folly,
in going upon a sporting expedition, against counsel and advice;
nothing but rejoicing at my return was heard or seen. My uncle
invited in the neighbors at evening; there was hot flip in abundance,
and ginger and cider for those who liked it. Tom Crotchet, the fiddler,
was called, young and old went to dancing, and the merriest night
that ever was known, was that in which young Bob Merry who was
lost in the mountain, came to life, having been two days and two
nights in the cave of “Old Sarah the hermitess.”
I am not sure that I did not appear to share in this mirth; but in
truth I felt too sober and solemn for hilarity. The whole adventure had
sunk deep into my mind, and though I did not immediately
understand its full effect upon my character, I had at least
determined never again to scorn the advice of those more
experienced than myself. I had also been made in some degree
aware of that weakness which springs from being always dependent
upon others; and a wholesome lesson had been taught me, in
finding my life saved by an old woman, whom a few hours before I
had treated with rudeness, impertinence, and scorn. I could not but
feel humbled, by discovering that this miserable old creature had
more generous motives of action, a loftier and more noble soul, than
a smart young fellow from New York, who was worth ten thousand
dollars, and who was an object of envy and flattery to more than half
the village of Salem.
(To be continued.)
The Great Northern Diver, or Loon.
The genus to which this bird belongs are all of a large size, and
entirely aquatic; they are seldom on land, and, although they have
great power, they seldom fly. The construction of their feet at once
points out their facility of diving and their ability to pass rapidly
through the water; the legs are placed far back, and the muscles
possess great power; and the whole plumage of the bird is close and
rigid, presenting a smooth and almost solid resistance to the waves
in swimming or diving.
The Great Northern Diver measures two feet and ten inches in
length, and four feet six inches in the expanse of the wings; the bill is
strong, of a glossy black, and nearly five inches long. It is met with in
the north of Europe, and is common at Hudson’s Bay, as well as
along the Atlantic border of the United States. It is commonly found
in pairs, and procures its food, which consists wholly of fish, in the
deepest water, diving for a length of time with astonishing ease and
rapidity. It is restless before a storm, and its cry, which foretells a
tempest, is like the shrill barking of a dog and maybe heard at the
distance of a mile. It is a migratory bird, always departing for warmer
regions when its fishing grounds are obstructed with ice. It is difficult
to kill these birds, as they easily elude their pursuers by their
astonishing faculty of diving.
The people of some parts of Russia tan the breasts of this bird,
and prepare them in such a manner as to preserve the down upon
them; they then sew them together, and sell them for pelisses, caps,
&c. The articles made of them are very warm, and perfectly
impervious to rain or moisture, which renders them very desirable in
the severe climates where they are used. The Greenlanders also
make use of these skins for clothing, and at the mouth of the
Columbia river, Lewis and Clarke saw numbers of robes made of
them.
The Laplanders cover their heads with a cap made of the skin of
this bird—which they call loom, a word signifying lame, and which
they apply to it because it is awkward in walking.
The loon is not gregarious, but, as before said, is generally found
in pairs. Its aversion to society is proved by the fact, mentioned by
travellers, that only one pair and their young are found on one sheet
of water. The nest is usually on the edges of small islands, or on the
margin of a fresh-water lake or pond. It contains two large brown
eggs.
In building its nest, the loon usually seeks a situation at once
secluded and difficult of access. She also defends her nest, and
especially her young, with great courage and vigor. She strikes with
her wings, and thrusts with her sharp bill as a soldier does with his
bayonet. It is, therefore, by no means easy to capture the nests or
the young of this bird.
Mr. Nuttall gives the following account of a young bird of this kind
which he obtained in the salt marsh at Chelsea, and transferred to a
fish-pond. “He made a good deal of plaint, and would sometimes
wander out of his more natural element, and hide and bask in the
grass. On these occasions, he lay very still until nearly approached,
and then slid into the pond and uttered his usual plaint. When out at
any distance, he made the same cautious efforts lo hide, and would
commonly defend himself, in great anger, by darting at the intruder,
and striking powerfully with his dagger-like bill. This bird, with a pink-
colored iris like the albinos, appeared to suffer from the glare of
broad daylight, and was inclined to hide from its effects, but became
very active towards the dusk of evening. The pupil of the eye in this
individual, like that of nocturnal animals, appeared indeed dilatable;
and this one often put down his head and eyes into the water to
observe the situation of his prey.
“This bird was a most expert and indefatigable diver, and would
remain down sometimes for several minutes, often swimming under
water, and as it were flying with the velocity of an arrow in the air.
Though at length inclined to be docile, and showing no alarm when
visited, it constantly betrayed its wandering habit, and every night
was found to have waddled to some hiding-place, where it seemed
to prefer hunger to the loss of liberty, and never could be restrained
from exercising its instinct to move onwards to some secure or more
suitable asylum.”
Mr. Nuttall makes the following remarks in respect to the voice of
the loon: “Far out at sea in winter, and in the great western lakes,
particularly Huron and Michigan, in summer, I have often heard, on a
fine, calm morning, the sad and wolfish call of the solitary loon,
which, like a dismal echo, seems slowly to invade the ear, and, rising
as it proceeds, dies away in the air. This boding sound to mariners,
supposed to be indicative of a storm, may be heard sometimes for
two or three miles, when the bird itself is invisible, or reduced almost
to a speck in the distance. The aborigines, nearly as superstitious as
sailors, dislike to hear the cry of the loon, considering the bird, from
its shy and extraordinary habits, as a sort of supernatural being. By
the Norwegians, its long-drawn howl is, with more appearance of
reason, supposed to portend rain.”

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Book Destruction from the Medieval to

the Contemporary New Directions in

Kant on Emotions: Critical Essays in the Contemporary

Companion to the History of the Book Eliot

The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250

The book of memory: a study of memory in medieval

New Directions in Wireless Communications Systems: From

The Computer Book From the Abacus to Artificial

New Directions in Third Wave Human Computer Interaction

New Directions in Third Wave Human Computer Interaction

New Directions in Book History

1. Book burning—History. 2. Books—Mutilation, defacement, etc.—

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

List of Figures vii

Select Bibliography 208

0.1 (photo: MacMillan) 3

6.3 Tom Phillips, A Humument (2011 edition © Tom Phillips.

Anthony Bale is Reader in Medieval Studies and Director of Graduate

Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at

Ross Birrell is an artist, writer and lecturer at the Glasgow School of

Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature and

to The History of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (2011), The

Nicola Dale studied at Manchester Metropolitan University. She

Kate Flint is Provost Professor of English and Art History at the

Gill Partington writes and researches on the material text, reading

Tom Phillips is a painter, printmaker and collagist, and the creator of A

Institute as well as an Honorary Member of the Royal Institute. Tom

Adam Smyth is a Tutorial Fellow in English at Balliol College, Oxford,

Heather Tilley is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at

Book shredding is difficult to watch. Not in the sense that it is uncom-

if a banknote is made of genuine Cypriot white virgin pulp, and he

general. Everything, it seems, is fibrous pulp to be manufactured into

Figure 0.1 (photo: MacMillan)

In the business of books, production and destruction are linked. Their

on the other he draws parallels with a European context: the image

the written word was a retrospective construction. Matthew Fishburn

demonstrates the cultural legibility of book burning as a shorthand for

preserve of religious zealots and repressive governments, and nor has

The five sections in this collection each present paradigmatic mecha-

Figure 0.2 (photo: Gill Partington)

Hirschfeld. Central to the establishment of modern sexology, the

hands of both over-enthusiastic readers and under-enthusiastic ones.

Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke and New

Books and bodies at the Institute of Sexual Science

Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in July

Ingenious Excuse of a Schoolboy.—A country schoolmaster

Keen Satire.—“You saved my life on one occasion,” said a

Talking To One’s Self.—Earl Dudley possessed in a remarkable

Being Behindhand.—An idle fellow complained bitterly of his

Aphorisms from Shakspeare.

Tell me, snow wreath, tell me why

Tell me, blue-bird, tell me why

Tell me, little daisy, tell

I have said enough as to the indulgent manner in which I was

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