loss

This page considers the loss of books through language death, war and decomposition of works on acid paper.

It covers -

• introduction
• language
• war and terror
• chemistry

     introduction

[under development

     language

A perspective is provided by Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2000) by Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine, Endangered Languages (Oxford: Berg 1991) edited by Robert Robins & Eugenius Uhlenbeck and the broader Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (London: HarperCollins 2005) by Nicholas Ostler.

One example is Aaron Lansky's charming Outwitting History: How a Young Man Rescued A Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilisation (London: Souvenir Press 2005)

     war and terror

In 1992 'ethnic cleansing' in Sarajevo was accompanied by deliberate destruction of the National & University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with loss of over 1.5 million books and manuscripts. As noted elsewhere in discussion of censorship, Pol Pot had earlier sought to free Kampuchea from improper ideas and attitudes by eliminating both Cambodia's libraries and librarians.

There has been surprisingly little written about biblioclasm or libricide. Three recent works are Rebecca Knuth's Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger 2003), The Holocaust & the Book: Destruction & Preservation (Amherst: Uni of Massachusetts Press 2001) edited by Jonathan Rose and Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Ancient Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan 2004) edited by James Raven.

The Holocaust & the Book is of particular merit; it can be supplemented by studies such as Stanislao Pugliese's 1999 Bloodless Torture: The Books of the Roman Ghetto under the Nazi Occupation (PDF). Initial Nazi immolation of 'entartete' print features here and in Guy Stern's Nazi Book Burning & the American Response (Detroit: Wayne State University 1990). We have not sighted Fernando Baez' Historia universal de la destruccion de libros: De las tablillas sumerias a la guerra de Irak (Barcelona: Editorial Destino 2004).

Attitudes towards biblioclasm are highlighted in Marc Drogin's Biblioclasm: The Mythical Origins, Magic Powers & Perishability of the written word (Savage: Rowman & Littlefield 1989) and - perhaps more memorably - in Elias Canetti's masterwork Auto-da-fe (London: Cape 1972). A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins 2003) by Nicholas Basbanes and Library: An Unquiet History (New York: Norton 2003) by Matthew Battles consider the durability of individual works and collections. Holbrook Jackson's quirky The Fear of Books (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 2001), like his The Anatomy of Bibliomania and and Charles Gillett's Burned books: neglected chapters in British history and literature (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1932), offers another view of western attitudes.

Statistics are provided in UNESCO's Lost Memory - Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the Twentieth Century (RTF), which notes the absence of attention to events such as the 1988 fire that damaged or destroyed around 3.6 million books in the Academy of Sciences Library in St Petersburg.

     chemistry

[under development








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