Universal History of the Destruction of Books, A: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq [Hardcover]

This Venezuelan librarian answers what a history student, at Baghdad's university in 2003, wonders after the library's been looted of every volume: why does man destroy so many books? The book begins and ends in Iraq, where the earliest texts we have survive, only because of the flames that consumed and preserved their clay tablets. Twelve years of research results in the first "single history of their destruction" (7). Intriguingly, the author has "concluded that the more cultured a nation or a person is, the more willing each is to eliminate books under the pressure of apocalyptic myths" (18) Bibliophiles often can be biblioclasts. We all, he insists, in dividing up "us" vs. "them" negate each other, and play into censorship, exclusion, and eradication as we cannot tolerate criticism or opposition.

Translated in pithy style by Alfred MacAdam, it's a fluid and direct overview. Uruk, where the first surviving books can be found in Sumer, represents the creation simultaneous with the destruction of texts. Tablets were baked in the fires of battle, between 4100 and 3300 BCE. Little survives from so many ancient eras: 75% of Greek manuscripts lost; 80% of Egyptian texts vanished. This grim catalogue continues, as we find patterns repeated from the start of civilization, as invaders and barbarians plunder and eliminate no less than the kings and the clerics.

It's a study perhaps better sampled, as Báez suggests, rather than taken start to finish. The nature of the topic makes an uneven, incomplete, and enigmatic treatment-- appropriately if frustratingly-- for the material. The tone's not always scholarly; there's moments of verve that ease the flow of often disheartening lists of the losses that have been incurred by fire, insects, weather, and ideology. Qin Shi Huang's forces in 213 BCE carried out a typical binge: "Functionaries went from house to house seizing books, which they then burned in a bonfire, to the joyful surprise of those who hadn't read them." (68) Augustus the emperor "burned more than 2,000 Greek and Roman works he didn't like. He was a severe critic." (77) "The life of Yakov ben Judah Leib Frankovich was that of any fanatic: unsettled, no security, immodest." (178)

You learn about Nicolas Turrianos, who in copying codices for the Spanish king Philip II enabled "a special collection of forbidden books made up of volumes sewn shut so that no one could read them." (174) Or, how the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, after Stalin's security chief Beria's death, sent subscribers a postcard of the Bering Sea to paste over the entry on that now disgraced chief of Soviet security.

And, while you may recognize the name of the venerable Swiss library at St Gall, I doubt if many will have heard of the first woman formally canonized, St. Wiborada. She threw herself on top of her buried books after the Huns set fire to the abbey. Her mutilated body was found above the library's contents, protected by her foresight beneath the earth. For this, she's venerated as the patron saint of librarians.

While the Nazi desecration gains attention, along with the Islamic and Christian efforts to silence those texts that challenged hegemony, you also learn about both sides in the Spanish Civil War, or Latin American and Bosnian examples, perhaps less documented. Chinese and Soviet biblioclasty, by comparison, received much less space than I expected, and the sustained attention to particular countries or centuries does become sporadic. This may be due to the outbreaks, followed by recoveries, and then-- unfortunately-- usually more outbreaks of fanaticism, that become never predictable throughout five thousand years of purportedly civilized society.

Báez, ending a brief chapter on "the natural enemies of books," notes how fragile transfer to CD or flash drives may be. Even if we can save 14 million volumes on a disc, all it takes is a single scratch and we've lost everything, once more. E-Books are no insurance against loss, for hackers will supplant Huns in coming centuries.

This survey moves, in Borgesian fashion like the allusion in its title, mainly by such anecdotes, short essays, and dutiful lists of what patrimony we have lost. The chapters progress largely chronologically. They often contain factoids and reflections that delight or-- more often-- depress, but the ability of a reader to use this compendium as a reference source may be limited. The index lists only book titles and proper names; the endnotes guide the inquirer to further reading, but the many references and asides in the text to other texts, lost or found, cannot be pursued easily. Citations outside of the endnotes absent, one cannot follow the leads that Báez creates, a strange self-referential system that again may recall Borges, as we're forced to take the author at his word about words we can or cannot track elsewhere.

Although there are many interesting tidbits of information that most bibliophiles and book lovers will find fascinating and enjoyable to learn about, I can't really rave about this book. The author's style of writing is very dry and factual in it's short listings of statistics. There are some sections where the author gives the reader more information on a particular instance of a book destruction incident, but other chapters are nothing more than a short line or two making me wonder if it would have been better to just give us a list in chronological order of what books were destroyed where, when and why. The first half of the book that details a lot of ancient history was more intriguing and eye-opening and I felt I learned a lot about the astonishing methods of book making and of the ancient scholars who collected in B.C. times. One doesn't really realize just how far back writing, language and books go until you read these first interesting chapters. The second half of the book that details more modern events from World War I on to the present, were more factual, uninteresting and so filled with statistics and boring listings that you couldn't remember them later if you wanted do. I have to say I found the majority of this book quite boring and doubt I'd recommend it to anyone other than readers highly interested in ancient history, or the history of manuscripts, scrolls or codices. Librarians as well would learn quite a lot of interesting information of the history of both public and private libraries that were created and destroyed, but I can't see the general populace or even a collector of rare books really finding this trivial information enjoyable.

"A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq" by Fernando Baez.

Translated by Alfred MacAdam. Atlas & Co., New York 2008.

For some reason, this book is small, only 5 ½ inches wide by 7 ¼ inches high, by about one inch thick. The book is like a hard-bound paper back, making it easy to carry onto an airplane. Despite the book's small physical size, the book is packed with much information on the libraries of the worlds, ancient and modern. The author's book, "A Universal History Of The Destruction Of Books", is actually a concise, comprehensive history of the wars and raids waged by mankind over the many centuries of written history.

The author is from Venezuela, so Fernando Baez wrote in Spanish and Alfred MacAdam translated the work into good English. If you query the WEB on Fernando Baez, you will find that he does not like the Iraq war and the occupation of Iraq. The author deals with libraries as collections of books, whether the books were in the form of cuneiform indentations on clay tablets, or papyrus or parchment or vellum, rolled up as scrolls or the more familiar (to moderns) rectangular collections of paper bound between two covers.

The author's work is comprehensive, covering so many libraries that I, personally, did not even know existed, and ranging from continent to continent. Therefore, his book is a good reference work on the history of libraries, in particular, and mankind, in general. Size limitations, however, means that he scrimped a little here and there. For example, on page 103, he writes about the library at Lindisfarne, Northumberland, and states that Lindisfarne was "...founded by a monk from Iona around 635." The monk was St. Aidan (died 651), an Irishman born (probably) in Connaught. (One of my grandsons is Aodhan, which is the Irish spelling of the name.) The Library of Matthew Corvinus (1443-1490) is given just about a single page (from the bottom of page 136 to page 137), while the author, Marcus Tanner, has devoted an entire book (some 288 pages long) to it. See: "The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of His Lost Library", Yale University Press, 2008.

Finally, I think it appropriate to mention that Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut, boasts of having the largest library, the Arnold Brenhard Library, dealing with the destruction of a people, "An Gorta Mor" ... "The Great Hunger", the famine that Ireland suffered through in the 19th Century.

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