Fahrenheit Four-fifty What?: Bookstore owners begin to burn books
As has been reported over the last week or so, self-described bibliophiles Tom Wayne and Will Leathem, owners of the Kansas City bookstore Prospero’s Books, have begun to burn their inventory of 50,000 titles after they could not sell or even give the books away. In a scene that really can’t help but sound like it’s from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, over Memorial Day weekend the two men dragged a few boxes of books to the sidewalk in front of their used bookstore, showered them with lighter fluid, and then set the whole thing ablaze. The books burned until the fire department came to put them out.
But this was no Nazi bonfire. It was more like the Buddhists in Vietnam in the early ‘60s who committed suicide by setting themselves on fire as political protest. Neither Wayne or Leathem feel that books should be burned or destroyed — on the contrary, they’re both ardent booklovers — but they’re doing this to attract attention to the fact that books are, well, no longer receiving any attention.
As Dan Barry reported in the New York Times over the weekend, “The men say they tried to give away books in bulk that were either not selling or in overabundance — to no avail. When a friend was sent to state prison, for example, they tried to donate books to the correctional system, but were denied. When they donated books to a local fund-raising event, some well-meaning person bought up most of those books and left them at the Prospero’s doorstep.”
One of the ironies of this is that, in my presentation last week at Book Expo, I said that the “print is dead” debate does not mean things like what happens in Bradbury’s novel, stressing that the advocates of digital reading are not the exterminators of the printed word. And yet here we have booksellers — not technologists — who are lightning the match and turning novels and non-fiction into ash.
It should also be mentioned that, in Fahrenheit 451, books are never explicitly banned outright by the government; they only begin to be burned when public disinterest in books grows so large that the government figures no one will miss them (and for the most part, no one does). Burning books was only the government’s reaction to the public’s reaction. In Kansas City, we might be seeing the sad first glimpse of this happening in real life.
NY Times Select: A Requiem for Reading in a Smoldering Pyre of Books
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I listened to your Book Expo talk about a Web 2.0 world. Amazing to have this book burning almost even as you spoke. The publishing world is shifting, but Book Expo proves again there’s still a lot of energy and momentum for the traditional route. For people who like change, seems like a great time to be in this industry. Thanks for your writing.
Hey there; yes, you’re totally right that the traditional route has a lot of life left, but if we can learn from some of the mistakes of other industries, and embrace this change happening all around us, I think we’ll be in much better shape than if we ignore it and keep hoping for blockbusters like Harry Potter to save us.
[…] 5th, 2007 by maxine Via James Long Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age » Fahrenheit Four-fifty What?: Bookstore owners begin to bu… As has been reported over the last week or so, self-described bibliophiles Tom Wayne and Will […]
You state: “It should also be mentioned that, in Fahrenheit 451, books are never explicitly banned outright by the government.”
Not quite so fast, Jeff. We are introduced to a society after the fact of it’s inception. So perhaps we aren’t reading government attacks on books.. but the novel is full of the government firemen, sent out to burn discovered secret libraries. Perhaps your argument is so week that you felt justified in playing the propagandist’s propagandist, but it doesn’t quite work.
You seem to have alot of brain, but very little nous..
Well, in terms of the book itself, even Bradbury himself has recently come out and said — to the chagrin of many — that the book’s not about censorship, but instead is about the dumbing down of culture:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/16524/
And the disappearance of books, first in disinterest, and then in flames, seemed like a good way to portray this. And in terms of my argument being strong or weak, I think the fact that bookstore owners are burning books speaks volumes. (Pun not intended; that would be displaying too much nous.)
I’m reading this late, sorry.
I see a different story here than you. Books are destroyed all the time, though usually by publishers and not booksellers since booksellers can usually return books they can’t sell. In order to make warehouse space, publishers routinely destroy their unsold (i.e., unsalable, unwanted, unremainderable) inventories. Of course, they do so by “pulping” them rather than burning them, and so few know. Authors are spared the shame, and editors the demoralization that comes from such apparent failure and waste. In this sense, books are no different from other commodities: they are often overproduced.
The story I see here is an old story: brick-and-mortar bookstores are a dying business and brick-and-mortar used book stores are already dead, with a few exceptions.
I closed down the last bookshop I hope I’ll ever own (my third - it’s a sort of money vortex which draws me in) in March 2007. I’d gone into it full of trepidation, with a clearly planned exit strategy (or so I thought). But the truth is, at a time when people are de-cluttering their houses - partly to be streamlined and minimalist, partly to make room for more useful clutter - it’s almost impossible to fully clear stock, even at my final week prices of 10 books for the price of two. Some day soon, I predict, the vast empires of Borders, Barnes and Noble and Waterstones, and the majority of publishers, will be left with a king’s ransom in fine books, all as unsaleable as fine movies on Betamax.