Bibliophilia:In 64 AD, a great sirocco wind swept across Rome and caused a nine-day conflagration that burned 10 out of the city's 14 ancient districts. Emperor Nero watched as 30,000 volumes of the Palatine Apollo library were reduced to ash and charcoal.
That the world has fiddled for 20 centuries while books burned is the central thesis of Polastron's monumental work of forensic bibliomania. Paris-based Polastron is a specialist in Chinese and Arab Studies as well as the author of the prize-winning study of paper, Le Papier: 2,000 Ans d'Histoire. His present book is both a history and a long wail of sorrow.
Books are burned for many reasons, none of them positive. In 411 BC, all the books of Protagoras were burned in the Athens agora because he had written, "As for the gods, we can neither confirm that they exist, nor if they do not exist. Many things prevent us from understanding this. The first is the obscurity of the subject, the second is the brevity of human life". Some 500 years later, the written words of St Jerome were devoured by a hungry bear in the Jura mountains. And in our own time, Pol Pot, whose "three years of hallucinations" left one third of Cambodians dead, declared war not only on teachers but on paper. What St Augustine called persecutio codicum tradendorum, the incrimination of books, is an essential part of revolutionary impulse. It is in the heart of every missionary zealot, this idea that the world grown rotten with civilisation will be restored by the ignorant. The corrupt will be overthrown - with their libraries, unfortunately.
Polastron, who loves paper, now fears that the destroyers may be the professionals, those librarians who spend endless hours in pursuit of "virtual libraries", where a book may never be touched again by its readers. The last 20 years has certainly seen a huge expansion in digital knowledge and learning, but he seems to be unaware of the balancing action that has now occurred within most serious library systems: many of the brightest young librarians nowadays are developing a new culture of care for rare books and special collections.
Yet books that were lost can never be recovered. The casualty list is endless, the message is depressing. The destruction of the great Jewish libraries of Europe is well documented here, from the Paris libraries of the Rothchilds and the genteel Leopold Blum to the priceless collections of the synagogue and rabbinical colleges at Rome. But it was in Poland with its 251 Jewish libraries, more than one and a half million volumes, that the Brandkommando dealt the Jewish patrimony of Europe its fatal blow, lighting fires in the synagogues of Bedzin, Poznan and Lublin. This Nazi activity echoes through the history of books and comes to rest in southern Europe, at that point when the Spanish Inquisition reached its climax of wanton pyromania. In 1499, on the orders of Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, 3,000 Muslims were converted by force. The defeated Moors were ordered to carry all their books and manuscripts with them where they or their books would be consigned to flames. The greatest treasures of the Arab world, masterpieces of calligraphy with gold Kufic letters on an azure background, vowels in red ink and diacritics in a deep blue made from pulverised lapis lazuli, all fell victim to the barbarous hysteria of that era.
Then again, books can be the unintended victim. Approximately 20 million books were lost in Britain during 1940s bombings. The manuscript of The Mill on the Floss was lost to an incendiary bomb in Coventry, the London Library was destroyed during a late Blitz in 1944. But it was the German night-raid of December 29th, 1940 that caused the greatest loss to the English book-trade. On that night the publishers' warehouses along Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane and Amen Corner were completely destroyed. Between six and 10 million books were lost. That morning the publisher Longmans, Green had nearly 6,000 titles on their active list. The following morning the Longman's list contained only 12 available titles.
There is no such thing as flameproof knowledge. In the fire that nearly destroyed the library of the National Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg in 1988, hundreds of thousands of books were burned and more than three million were water-damaged. Yet within a week of the fire more than 15,000 volunteers had arrived to clean up the mess. In what must be one of the greatest examples of the Russian love of books, more than 800,000 rare volumes were dried on the private washing-lines of St Petersburg homes. The patrimony of Russia was rescued by its own citizens. Which reminds us of the failed efforts of Felix at Constantine (Cirta) in Algeria who ordered the local bishops to hand over all the manuscripts. "The readers are holding on to them," replied the Bishop, "but we are no traitors; order our deaths instead." Those early Christian readers, like the citizens of St Petersburg, are at the heart of every great library. As Polastron writes in this cathedral of a book: "But there is yet another, more deeply buried meaning that is always present beneath all the others: The book is the double of the man, and burning it is the equivalent of killing him".
Thomas McCarthy works at Cork City Libraries. His most recent book is Merchant Prince (2005)
Books on Fire: The Tumultuous Story of the World's Great Libraries By Lucien X Polastron Thames and Hudson, 371 pp. £18.95