Sesquiotica

Libricide means ‘the act of killing a book’. You can find the word in dictionaries, but not in too many other places. But why not?

Well, can you kill a book?

If so, how?

A book, once it has been published and distributed around the world, is not dead as long as someone has a copy and remembers it. Some books are even still alive in a kind of shadow form, spoken of or described or quoted from, long after the last known copy is gone – Aristotle’s second volume of the Poetics is one such, and there are quite a few others. 

But a book is not alive like a person, an individual with volition, a singular existence, an internal world that can be obliterated in an instant. A book is like a chord, a complex note that causes sympathetic resonances of varying detail in people who have read some or all of it or even just heard quotes from it or descriptions of it. No one can experience all of what a book can bring, but indefinitely many people can experience some of it, and it is alive to some degree for anyone who encounters any copy of it. So banning books, burning books, and other such destructions can kill opportunities for that book to come alive in some people, but as long as there is a known copy somewhere, the book is not altogether gone. A book is only fully gone if it is fully forgotten. A dead person may have an epitaph, but a book is words, and even its title is part of its living self, so if its title lives the book still has a last breath.

And so, of course, there is no list of books that are truly gone. But there are countless such books. Most of them were never published in the first place. That’s the surest way to kill a book: keep even one copy from getting out into the world. Someone writes a book, tries to get it published, no one wants it, the person eventually dies and, with that, no one remembers the book (unless, I suppose, someone finds it among the deceased person’s papers thereafter).

And then there are others, written once, published once, never having made a real mark, and somehow all copies of them have succumbed to entropy, all mention of them lost and all memory of them evaporated. It must happen from time to time. Every so often someone finds a copy of a book no one can remember, no other evidence of can be found, and the book has effectively come back from the dead – at least for the person who finds it and those the person tells about it.

In a broader sense, however, libricide is a more common thing. You may use the synonym biblioclasm, modelled on iconoclasm: it’s from Greek for ‘book-breaking’, and it refers to the destruction of books. Even if it is hard to kill a book for all people and all time, you can kill the book for some people in some times and places. You can destroy copies, making the book effectively unalive for those who would otherwise have had access to it.  You can kill the opportunity for some people to have the book resonate in them. You can slowly deplete the store of ideas in the same way as you can kill cells in a body. In this way, libricide is a kind of wasting disease of the body politic.

Libricide is also the title of a book by Rebecca Knuth, and I regret to say that I haven’t read it – it was published in 2003, and it is not easily available now, so I could say that it exists only in an adumbrated potential form for me. But here is what it’s about, from the author’s website:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings, declared German poet Heinrich Heine. This book identifies the regime-sponsored, ideologically driven, and systemic destruction of books and libraries in the 20th century that often served as a prelude or accompaniment to the massive human tragedies that have characterized a most violent century. Using case studies of libricide committed by Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Cultural Revolution in China, and Chinese Communists in Tibet, Knuth argues that the destruction of books and libraries by authoritarian regimes was sparked by the same impulses toward negation that provoked acts of genocide or ethnocide. Readers will learn why some people – even those not subject to authoritarian regimes – consider the destruction of books a positive process. Knuth promotes understanding of the reasons behind extremism and patterns of cultural terrorism, and concludes that what is at stake with libricide is nothing less than the preservation and continuation of the common cultural heritage of the world.

We know quite well that such libricide is not a thing of the past. Not even a decade after Knuth wrote her book, libricide was attempted – and, in a limited way, succeeded – in the great historical centre of learning in central West Africa: Timbuktu. Books from past centuries are a great treasure there; many households have preserved them over the years, and the dry desert air helps minimize the rot that can lead to a libricide-by-neglect in damper climates. These books illuminate the understandings and views of past times in the region, and they show a greater openness in many ways than most modern people remember. A local librarian, Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, was key in efforts to collect the books from their many family chests and assemble them in one place so that they could be read, studied, shared. But when the Ansar Dine group of religious reactionaries occupied the city, Haidara had to turn his energy to coordinating a secret evacuation of the books from Timbuktu to Bamako. The Ansar Dine were finally driven out of Timbuktu, but as they were leaving they set fire to what books remained in the library – more than 4,000. But Haidara and his colleagues had successfully gotten more than 350,000 to safety.

Well, “safety.” They are assembled in one place in Bamako, which has a more humid climate; they need proper conditions for preservation, which costs money, or they need to be taken back to the desert climate in Timbuktu, which also costs money and may not be safe.

So 4,000 books were killed – except for any burned volumes that had copies that still exist. But how do you keep these books alive? When they were all gathered in one place, they were an easy target for those who would destroy them, but they were also easier to smuggle out. When they were stored in chests in people’s houses, they were perhaps less likely to be actively destroyed, but more likely to be lost to memory, or known of by only very few. If a tree falls in a forest, and it is used to make paper that is used to make a book that no one alive has read and almost no one knows exists, is the book alive?

Fortunately, the Timbuktu books are, gradually, being scanned, digitized, saved in electronic media, so they can be propagated and preserved in a distributed redundancy. Which is good, but electronic media are also vulnerable, and electronic formats change over time. Electronic media provide new ways to keep books alive, but they also provide new ways to destroy them, even to seek them out and erase them (ask anyone who has ever had a book deleted from their e-reader because the rights changed).

And there is one more way in which books can, at least by degrees, die: when people can see them and read them but no longer understand them. An obvious instance is if they are in a language no one knows anymore, but less obvious cases are ones where the language seems understandable but the cultural references, the metaphors and idioms and turns of phrase and common cultural knowledge, are no longer current, and people read the book and take from it something quite different from what its writer(s) had in mind. (A Canticle for Leibowitz is an extended playing out of this.) The book has been zombified, or transmuted like a person in the movie The Thing. It is alive as a text, and it looks the same, but is it alive as the book it at first was? 

And yet no book is understood exactly the same way by two people, or even by the same person at different times. How do we decide what is alive? Should we speak, as atomic physicists do, in terms of “half-life,” the time it takes for a given quantity of an element or particle – or, perhaps, a book, or the understanding thereof – to decrease by half? And how would we measure it?

And what is half alive? What makes a word alive? A linguist can say “I used it, you understood it, it’s a word.” But if I try to play LIBRICIDE on the Scrabble app (which permits only words in the official Scrabble dictionary), it won’t let me (this is what brought this word to mind for me to write about it!). Does that make this word less alive than others? Or how do you measure the life of a word? Common words are more used and so are in one way more alive, but uncommon words can have much more effect when they are used – speak of petrichor and many people will stop for a moment and inhale happily through their noses. And some words bring to mind other things too, like many-branched trees. Libricide looks like it could be libericide, ‘killing liberty’, and indeed the death of a book is the death of a freedom to experience what is in that book, to resonate in a way you will never otherwise resonate. It also looks like it could be libracide, ‘killing scales’ (libra), ‘killing weight and balance’, and again, the weight and balance of knowledge books can bring is also relevant.

On the other hand, we know that some books carry lies. Some books sow evil. Some books are toxins or pathogens waiting to be spread. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” some people say, but anyone who has caught COVID on a clear day or been gassed under a blue sky will have another perspective. The best disinfectant is preventing the spread in the first place. But the second best, which is optimally kept in reserve for when the first fails, is antigens and antidotes that require knowledge of the harmful agent. There are vials of smallpox frozen securely in a few places, and it is similarly worth keeping the most vicious books around, carefully, so we know what we are fighting against. And also because we are not always right about what is wrong, and things suppressed at one time may at another be found to bring balance and freedom.

But really, it is not the book that does these things. It is the people who read them and act on them, and the people who wrote them in the first place. The existence of books is always contingent: they need humans to preserve them and to preserve the understanding of them and the knowledge about their use and effects. There have been stories and other texts that stayed alive not in print at all but through repeated telling and retelling. A book only lives when it lives in a person, and it has its own life – or its own lives – in each person. Its printed existence helps make that life possible. But it is up to us to keep books alive, as much as we can, in as many ways and as many people as we can.