101 Reasons to Stop Writing

From the How Are We Going To Generate Buzz Dept comes this news: Mo. Man Burns Books as Protest (David Twiddy for Associated Press).

The gist: A Missouri used bookseller decided to burn a portion of his old stock as a protest against “society’s diminishing support for the printed word.”

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

Of course, there’s a ripple of discontent at this news on the literary blogosphere. Google searches for “Wayne Prospero” and “book burn” since the story broke turn up almost two thousand blog posts, enough to fill a (bad) book.

(Challenge: try reading through those links to isolate the original thoughts, and you’ll know what it’s like to read the slushpile.)

Now, let’s try to look past the point that this is obviously a publicity stunt — not only to drum up business for the clearance sale, but to promote and fundraise for the bookseller’s self-publishing company. The bookstore’s press release (on their front page, as of now) states that:

For $1 a book (+ postage), you can save these books from the flame. We will not take these $s as profit, but will use them to publish new books.

The first book listed on the publisher’s website is a poetry collection written by one of the co-owners of the bookstore. (Not the one named in the AP story, but his name is on the press release.)

But we’re going to try looking past that.

The booksellers can bluster all they like about how their act of book-burning is “art” and/or “protest” (the two are not synonymous). Perhaps they’ll raise enough money from the ransom of random titles to print yet another volume of poetry. But for anyone who loves the (well-) written word, the process of reaction goes something like this:

Book Burning = Censorship = Nazis = Holocaust

While the adage “any publicity is good publicity” can seem true in theory, I doubt that the booksellers were prepared to be known as “the book burners” for the rest of their lives. In this world you are forever judged by your worst public act — if they followed this stunt with a cross-country murder spree, they’d still be known as “The Book-Burning Killers”.

But let’s look past that to the heart of the matter: our misplaced horror at the idea of book-burning.

What’s really going on here is not art, nor protest. It’s merely a creative solution to the problem that faces all used booksellers: overstock. Secondhand bookstores are not run by astute entrepreneurs. They’re run by readers, obsessive-compulsive collectors, and as Paul Riddell has observed, by frustrated writers desperate to pretend that they’re connected to publishing business. Under the ubiquitous “exchange for credit” system, they always have more stock coming in than going out. If the store survives the owner’s staggering fiscal incompetence, eventually the stock will fill the shelves, floor to ceiling, in double rows, and spill over into cardboard boxes, storage rooms, attics and crawlspaces, adjoining buildings, shipping containers, warehouses and (always) the owner’s house.

In the past, the typical solution to this was the cleansing warmth of an insurance fire. On some occasions, the books have to be destroyed because the owner died under the consequences of his own poor stacking technique, and only the hardiest of collectors are prepared to buy a book that smells of dead guy.

And what’s really being destroyed? Copies of written works, not the works themselves. Is anyone really shedding a tear at the destruction of one of the millions of copies of The Hunt for Red October? If the only surviving copy of some long-forgotten work is in a warehouse adjoining a used bookstore in Missouri, perhaps the fire is the best place for it.

The world is no poorer for the loss of a few battered copies of uninteresting books. The real crime is the exploitation of our fear/repulsion of censorship to make a few bucks, and to put more poetry into the world.

(Thanks to Paul Riddell for the link.)