The Ecology of Books – Read them or Drive over them?

A book that’s really old is worth a pot of gold!

Each aged tome deserves a caring home

Today’s blockbusters? – turn to heat – or EAT !

“I just can’t bring myself to throw away a book – any book” is a sentiment that a second-hand bookseller will hear almost every day. This reverence for books , widely-shared in our supposedly pluralist society , is not far removed from the fundamentalist practices of the strict Jew, who, for fear of destroying the name of God, hoards all obselete papers in a “genizah”, or the Moslem who considers any disrespectful treatment of a copy of the Koran to be sacrilegious. It would seem that horror at the execution of heretics AND their works, Nazi book-burnings, Ray Bradbury’s story “Fahrenheit 451” and family memories of “book-binning” by ignorant executors are all indestructibly enshrined in our folk consciousness. Simultaneously, we cannot ourselves destroy books, yet fear that they might fall into the hands of philistines who gladly will. “If anything happens to me, my children will put the books in the skip – I just want to know they’ll go to a good home” is another sentiment frequently expressed by our older clients. What will ACTUALLY happen to our libraries “if something happens to us” is that executors, auctioneers, booksellers, market stalls, jumble sales, charity shops and “book-banks” will engage in a game of PASSING THE BOOK. No-one wants to be the one to do the dirty deed, each pretending that a good home will eventually be found for “Best Wine Buys 1967”, Macaulay’s Essays Volume 5 only, “The M.&S. Book of Collage” and “A Visitors Guide to Blenheim Palace”. Surely people are desperate for books in the Third World?

These sentiments are now QUITE OUT OF DATE, and it is my business to convince you of that.

The time taken to write a book hasn’t changed much over the millenia – maybe a month, maybe a decade, but more likely six months to two years of diligent toil on the part of the author. The difference is that before the age of printing, the “writing” was literal – the finished product being just ONE copy. Fear of fire sometimes restricted the work to daylight hours. Even in the early years of printing , the cost in human time of producing the paper, setting the type, screwing down the press, collating , folding, sewing and binding was so great that the value of each finished copy was still the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of pounds, and to destroy it was, in effect, to annihilate weeks of human life. Burning heretical books rather than the author himself was very effective. Nevertheless, despite the labour-intensive nature of early printing, over-production was becoming a problem in Rome as early as 1472. Forty books published in a year! Three hundred copies of each!! Too many printers were flooding the market. “Our house is full of printed books but empty of the necessities of life.” complain the firm of Sweynheym and Pannartz in their petition to Pope Sixtus IV protesting against the loss of their monopoly.

What of today. The number of titles printed annually in Britain has doubled 17 times since Caxton started work around 1475. The production of perhaps 10 books per year in the late fifteenth century had become 1000 by 1725, 10,000 by 1922, 75,000 by 1991 and 125,000 by 2003. At first production doubled every ten years or so, but between 1500 and 1900 the doubling period slowed to about 50 years.. Now we are in the midst of a second, computer-generated printing revolution, with a doubling every 18 years. Perhaps a third of a billion copies of books are sold every year in the U.K., and yet this flood of typography is still accorded a reverence more appropriate to the days of illuminated manuscripts. How to compare the intrinsic worth of today’s assemblyline-printed books with the handmade products of yesteryear? How to decide the fate of these sacred volumes? As A P Herbert’s fictional rebel Albert Haddock debated during the war, how to decide whether a book should best be sent forward to the troops as reading material, or shredded and converted into shell casings?

In an egalitarian world, the value of a human-being’s work, whether writer, printer, bookseller or reader, can be taken to be some 3000 Kilocalories per day- the energy in food we need to survive. Away with comparisons of merit and differences in wage-rates! ECONOMICS should become THERMONOMICS. Energy inputs in the form of fossil or renewable fuels, and from materials such as paper and leather, can be measured in the same units as human effort. Thus we can calculate the thermonomic cost of making a book, and compare this with the energy that could be recovered by destroying it! For instance, burning or eating a modern paperback book would release about 3000 kilocalories of energy ,almost two-thirds of that obtainable by burning the same weight of coal and more than twice the energy from eating the same weight of Mars Bar.

An illuminated manuscript on vellum, taking a scribe several years to complete can hence be objectively valued at several millions of kilocalories, a thermonomic value far outweighing its potential for warming barbarian vandals or for feeding their goats. A modern paperback, however, which can be sold at the equivalent of no more than one hours’s work, is worth only a few hundred kilocalories in human effort, about one tenth of its fuel value.( What, I might ask, IS the point of reading a bestseller that so many others have already read for you? - but that is another question). Publishers rarely resist the temptation to let the presses roll out another few thousand copies, at a “run-on” cost of pence each. All mass-produced modern books are worth far more as fuel than as repositories of human wisdom; it is our DUTY to recycle them.

Recycling books, however, is not straightforward. As a second-hand bookseller, I am in the front line of coping with today’s overproduction, being widely considered to be the best staging post on the way to that GOOD HOME that everyone desires for their beloved but unwanted collections. In more than thirty years, many are the ways I have tried to dispose of books. Here are a few.

1. SELLING Sir Stanley Unwin remarked in his “The Truth about Publishing” that however difficult it might be to write, print or even read a book, the most difficult matter of all was to SELL it! He was right; we can sell no more than a quarter of the books we are brought, and no more than a half of those we accept. Over thirty hears, this disparity has had serious consequences for my way of life and for the buildings I inhabit.

2. CHARITYING At two or three books for a pound, you can shift several hundred a day at the Village Fete, Festival , Wakes or Well-Dressing,– but two-thirds of your stock will remain at the end of the day.

3. SURGERYING and SHOPDROPPING – smuggling magazines into dentist’s waiting rooms, or slipping books OUT of your poacher’s pockets onto the shelves in other bookshops, is a very satisfying operation but can only be employed on a small scale.

4. DROWNING Though the slightest damp can mar a book for ever, entirely destroying it by water is well-nigh impossible. After months under a brick in a bucket, it will bob to the surface readable and entirely unconsolidated for the purpose of:

5. BURNING which produces an unmanageable froth of ash from the unconsolidated book. Maybe a very large stove with a fierce draught would cope, but the fumes produced are almost certainly unacceptable.

6. COMPOSTING Inspired by a friend whose library had turned to soil in a leaky garage, we established the “Millennium Book Compost Heap” . After five years it had shrunk to a mass of grey clay with messages (“…try harder...” advised one fragment). Our analyst customer John Futter reported that, half the dried weight of a sample was useful organic “humus”, but that the levels of lead and zinc were some 300 and 200 parts per million – coming maybe from inks, maybe from the wear of the type used to print older volumes. Alas, the news came too late to stop us filling the “Jubilee” and “Saddam Hussein” bins. What are we to do with it all?

7. PULPING Authorities differ. NO BOOKS!! say some – the glue forms balls and gums up the machinery. Just mix them in says another, but it will reduce the market price, compared to 100% newsprint. Do we first remove spines, cloth bindings, laminated jackets? Almost certainly, your local waste-paper collection will reject books unless they are very well hidden.

8. VOLCANO Throwing rubbish down disused mineshafts is a Derbyshire tradition now frowned upon. Daily Telegraph satirist Peter Simple once had his impoverished book-reviewer Julian Birdbath living in a disused Peak leadmine; somewhere I have a letter of thanks for keeping Julian well supplied with the works of The Great Unread. It must have been he that occasionally set fire to a shaft-full, with spectacular results.

9. TARMACING Sources tell me that thousands of romantic novels have been mixed into the tarmac of motorway carriageways North of Watford, to improve their flexibility. Is this an urban myth, or could RESURFACING finally solve the problem of RECYCLING THE BOOK.