Bibliocide

Reader, I know I harped on you about how your comics weren't worth anything, but now I'm going to start in on your books.

"Which is my plaintive way of saying that I do worry about you and Franny when I get a chance, but not nearly so often as I'd like to."

Let's be frank. I used to get off on people thinking I was a super well-read individual. I just had books strewn around all over the place, waiting for someone to ask me about goddam Mrs. Havisham. I even wear glasses, Reader. I tell ya, I'm sick.

"Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat."

Except, no one ever really asks that. And if they did I'd probably just be annoyed. I'd probably think something like: Oh, you have something to say about S'pectations? That's how we say it in the biz, "S'pectations" *

"After this ritual viewing we continue on our way, heading as usual for some space we can cross, so we can talk."

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 the protagonist is charged with keeping a book at the end when he joins the other "keepers". That is, he's to recount the entirety of a book he had read sometime in the past, since said book had been ostensibly destroyed by the firemen. At first he's flabbergasted that anyone would expect him to remember an entire book, word for word, so that in it's absence it can be passed along in an oral tradition. But, with time, the contents of the book he's tasked with starts to come back to him, he had it all along. What I'm trying to get across to you Reader is that you've already taken what you need from the books you've read.

"I walked along the tracks in the long sad October light of the valley, hoping for an SP freight to come along so I could join the grape-eating hobos and read the funnies with them."

That isn't to say that there aren't books worth re-reading, but there are many that are not. It's not to say you won't ever find any pleasure in picking a random book off the shelf and reading a few pages while the coffee brews, just as long as you do just that. It's not to say that you should get rid of your books, but maybe you could part with a few of them? Do you even remember reading The Stand?

"In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminished mental capacity even to think about rape; to carry one out would be the strongest possible proof of insanity - but among Loonies such mental disorders would not gain a rapist any sympathy."

This all stems from an article I read not too very long ago in which a man, who, like me, gets off on people thinking he's clever, coined the term "bibliocide". He was preparing to move, with his wife, into a smaller home, and there just wasn't going to be any room for the massive amount of books he had acquired over the years. And to get rid of these books, for him, was bibliocide.

"My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one."

Getting rid of a book is not bibliocide. Getting rid of a book, at least in the intention of someone else reading it, would be better described as biblio-genesis (Ok, so I like to make up clever little words, too). I think bibliocide is to have a book shut firmly on the shelf for years, reaching no one. A perfect book is a waste; the steady march of that white crease on the spine is the steady march of knowledge. Go to your shelf and pick a book and give it to someone, even if you just take it down to a shelter or something. Let the book breathe, let it do what it was meant to do. And when you do, come back and tell Mods about it in the comment section, we'd like to know what books are getting new life.

If you can name the books in which all the snippets were taken from there's a prize in it for you!

"Never lend a book." - Adm. William Adama



*We don't say that in the biz.