Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” For Shaun Bythell it may be more of a case of burning his own fingers.
Bythell, the 34-year-old proprietor of The Bookshop in Wigtown in Galloway, is an affable man, who looks a little like the shambling television chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s long-lost twin. Ordinarily, he is not the type to cause offence. Yet soon he will risk the wrath of his neighbours in this small town on Scotland’s south-west tip, when he holds a public bonfire of old and unread books.
Bythell’s problem is one that most bibliophiles face sooner or later: he has too many books - about 80,000 - many of which have no chance of being sold. Hence the fire.
Some have torn covers, like the copy of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Confusion, which he fingers rather reluctantly before consigning to one of the “to burn” boxes. A previous owner has torn out all of the colour plates from Otto Herman’s Birds Useful and Harmful, rendering it useless. And it is unlikely that anyone will miss Sewage Treatment Design and Specifications or a 1994 edition of Miller’s Antiques Guide.
Other works destined for the pyre have simply gone out of fashion. “Take these old Penguin paperbacks of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga,” Bythell says. “They didn’t even sell after the recent TV adaptation. A lot of the books we get are from people of a certain age moving into smaller houses, and I suppose there is a raft of authors that that generation might have read who are more or less forgotten now.”
He reels off a list: Charles Morgan, Francis Brett Young, Dennis Wheatley. Does he have any second thoughts about torching them along with 3,000 other titles? “Not really,” he says, with the nonchalance of a Torquemada.
This is no ordinary bonfire, however. Two local artists, Norrie Steele and Julie Houston, have been brought in to design a suitably theatrical method of incineration. A large chimney will be built in a field, made from books stacked on a platform suspended between four telegraph poles and topped with a wire basket filled with more books. This will then be stuffed with straw and sloshed with diesel. Literature’s loss will be art’s gain.
At least, that’s the aim. But some inhabitants of Wigtown are concerned. In 1997, it became Scotland’s national book town - a Caledonian version of Hay-on-Wye - and transformed itself economically. Where once you could almost see tumbleweed blowing in the streets, there are now 25 bookselling businesses. Many owners are understandably reluctant to bite (or rather burn) the hand that feeds them. “It’s taken so long for us to get to this position,” say one. “Do we really want people to think, ‘Oh, Wigtown, that’s the place where they burn books’?”
But the root of most of these objections is far more instinctive: book-burning remains one of the west’s most enduring cultural taboos. “Even in a farming area like this, it seems somehow more shocking than cutting a cow in half and pickling it in formaldehyde,” says Michael McCreath, chairman of Wigtown’s book festival. “My job is to support writing, so this is not exactly what I’d be doing. It has such horrendous historical connotations.”
The Book of Acts records that early Christians burned sinful books (just as some contemporary American evangelists now torch copies of the supposedly satanic Harry Potter books). Torquemada burned the Talmud during the Spanish Inquisition. In 1992, the war in Bosnia was marked by at least two acts of intentional “bibliocide”. Serbian forces attacked Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute with incendiary grenades, destroying its collection of Islamic manuscripts, and then launched a three-day assault against the National and University Library of Bosnia.
The iconic burning of “decadent” books by the Nazis, however, overshadows all of these in the public imagination.
Joyce Watson, who runs Wigtown’s Old Bank book shop, is not alone in making the connection: “We had a woman living near here who died recently who had spent the second world war working for the Dutch resistance. I wonder what she would have made of Shaun’s event?”
Watson’s outrage is genuine. But Shaun Bythell is no Nazi and no one is suggesting he is trying to suppress information. The books destined for the fire are mass-produced artefacts - their contents will not disappear when they burn. If the objectors’ point is that books symbolise free speech, why are they not then sentimental about using newspapers as firelighters or fish and chip wrappings?
There is also a practical problem: what do you do with unwanted books? They can be sent to the developing world - but how many Kenyan schoolchildren will really benefit from the works of Galsworthy? Does it justify the aviation fuel?
It may be true, as Watson points out, that public libraries tend not to destroy books. But they often sell unwanted stock to book dealers, who pick what they want and bin the rest. The end result is the same. “In the past I’ve hired a skip every six months or so for dead stock,” says Bythell. “So they probably have ended up in landfill or being incinerated privately somewhere. Nobody complained then.”
