A Brief History of Book Burning, From the Printing Press to Internet Archives | History| Smithsonian Magazine

When al-Qaida Islamists invaded Mali, and then Timbuktu in 2012, among their targets were priceless manuscripts—books that needed to be burned. But the damage could’ve been much worse if not for men like Abdel Kader Haidara, who risked their lives to protect the medieval works. He and others succeeded in smuggling out 350,000 manuscripts, proving not only how much the books were valued, but also the lengths to which ordinary people were willing to go to save them. It was a remarkable victory in the long history of books threatened by would-be arsonists—and a relatively rare one at that.

Books and libraries have been targeted by people of all backgrounds for thousands of years, sometimes on purpose and sometimes as a side effect of war. In 213 BC, the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang (best remembered for his Terracotta Army in Xian) ordered a bonfire of books as a way to consolidate power in his new empire. according to historian lois mai chan, “his basic goal of his was not so much to do away with these schools of thought altogether as to bring them under government control.” poetry, philosophy, and history books were specifically selected so that the new emperor could not be compared to the more virtuous or successful rulers of the past. Although the exact amount of information lost is unknown, Chan writes that the historical genre suffered the greatest loss.

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qin was just one in a long line of ancient rulers who felt sufficiently threatened by ideas expressed in written form to recommend arson. in titus livy’s history of rome, completed in the 1st century a.d., he describes rulers of the past who ordered that books containing the oracles’ predictions and details about celebrations such as the bacchanal be banned and burned to prevent disorder and the propagation of foreign customs; The philosophers Giordano Bruno and Jan Hus took positions contrary to the Catholic Church, the former for his work on Copernican cosmology, the latter for attacking ecclesiastical practices such as indulgences. scholar hans j. Hillerbrand writes that the executioner charged with killing heretics like Bruno and Hus was often the same person who burned his books.

if not for rebecca knuth, author of libricide: the regime-sponsored destruction of books and libraries in the 20th century and book burnings and library destruction: extremist violence and cultural destruction, qin and religious leaders like him are only a small part of the first equation of book burning. “Much of the burning of old books was a function of conquest,” Knuth says. Just look at one of the most famous examples of burning, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. the contents and structure of the famous building were burned during multiple periods of political upheaval, including in 48 BC. when caesar chased pompey to egypt and when caliph omar invaded alexandria in 640 a.d.

what changed everything was the printing press, invented by johannes gutenberg in 1440. not only were there suddenly many more books, there was also more knowledge. “With the printing press came a huge increase in literacy and modern science and all that stuff,” Knuth says. “and some people in authoritarian regimes, they somehow want to reverse the effects of the printing press.”

according to knuth, the motives behind book burning changed after the printing press helped bring about the age of enlightenment, though burning through collateral damage of war continued to crop up (just consider the destruction of the library of congress of the united states during the war of 1812 or all the libraries destroyed throughout europe during the second world war). people saw knowledge as a way to change themselves and the world, so it became a much more dangerous commodity, no longer exclusively controlled by the elite. What better way to reshape the balance of power and send a message at the same time than by burning books?

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The unifying factor among all types of intentional bookburns in the 20th century, says Knuth, is that the perpetrators feel like victims, even if they are the ones in power. Perhaps the most infamous book burnings were those involving Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who regularly used language that framed themselves as victims of the Jews. Similarly, when Mao Zedong took power in China and implemented the Cultural Revolution, any books that did not conform to the party’s propaganda, such as those promoting capitalism or other dangerous ideas, were destroyed. More recently, Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Public Library, home to nearly 100,000 rare books of Tamil history and literature, was burned down by Sinhalese Buddhists. the Sinhalese felt that their Buddhist beliefs were threatened by the Hinduism of the Tamils, even though they outnumbered the Tamils.

Even when knowledge itself is not prevented from reaching the public, the symbolic weight of burning books is heavy. “Books are not absolutely dead things, but they contain a potency of life in them so as to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are,” wrote John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, in his 1644 book Areopagitica. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself…”, an idea that continues to be advocated in modern culture, as in ray bradbury’s fahrenheit 451.

“A book is a loaded gun next door,” warns one character to another in Bradbury’s story, arguing why they should be burned and their knowledge erased. “Who knows who could be the target of the learned man?”

or, as author barbara tuchman said in her 1980 speech at the library of congress, “books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is mute, literature mute, science paralyzed, thought and speculation stagnant. without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.”

Today, with the new technological advances offered by the Internet, the possibility of digitizing written documents seems to offer books a new immortality. but not so fast, knuth says. “We have technology to preserve so much knowledge, we just have to be careful. if you don’t keep turning it into an updated form of technology, it doesn’t matter if you made copies if you can’t access them.”

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this is an issue regularly addressed by archivists at the smithsonian institution, including electronic records archivist lynda schmitz fuhrig.

“There are software companies that have disappeared or gone out of business, and some of that software just goes out of use,” says schmitz fuhrig. “And there’s not only the software issue, but also hardware and operating systems that may not work with these older files.”

Archivists try to use formats that have been around for a long time and stood the test of time, like pdf for documents, but even keeping up with changing technology doesn’t guarantee security. schmitz fuhrig says that one of the biggest challenges now is storage space. “A few years ago we talked about gigabytes and then terabytes and now we are entering the area of ​​petabytes.”

Although the technology exists, transferring written documents to digital files requires time and money, resources that are not always available. sometimes doing so goes against the beliefs of whoever is in power. Just consider that under President George W. Bush EPA Libraries were threatened with closure in 2006, prompting the American Library Association and scientists working at EPA to lobby Congress to ensure that EPA’s budget could cover the cost of maintaining the libraries. libraries (although some libraries were closed, they reopened in September 2008). Or look at the scientific research documents that were locked away or destroyed under the Stephen Harper administration in Canada in 2014, which had a chilling effect on what could be researched and what studies were published. As scientist Steven Bell, who spent decades working for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, told Smithsonian.com, “Although we still have our jobs, we’ve basically been prevented from doing science.” although the methods may be different (and less visible) than in the past, the results are the same: knowledge is taken from the public on purpose.

Technology has undoubtedly changed the way we share and store information, but Knuth argues that the core motivations for book burning, whatever form it takes, remain the same: to prioritize one type of information about another.

“This is why power is so scary,” says Knuth. “because power allows you to put into practice the logic of your own beliefs.”

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