Captain Brian Trilogy

Books in the Trilogy are sequential, spanning nearly a decade. The award-winning Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles is a good place to start, but each book stands on its own.

Monday, December 3, 2012

BOOK-BURNING

As book-burnings go, mine was a minor event, but followed a tradition established in antiquity, about the same time the book itself was created. A King of Judah reputedly burned a portion of a scroll penned by Jeremiah. His action was deliberate as was the destruction of the Library of Ashurbanipal (also in the 7th century BC). The destruction of the Library of Alexandria has always been a mystery, as it has been blamed on several groups (Romans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, among others) over a period of several hundred years. Either the library suffered repeated torchings or there was a single event that occurred sometime during that several-hundred-year span. Adding to the complexity is the fact that all of the manuscripts were not under a single roof. I prefer the scenario that Julius Caesar inadvertently started the conflagration that destroyed the main library, modeled after Aristotle's Lyceum, when he burned his ships in the adjacent harbor in 48 BC.

While papyrus, parchment, and paper make great fuel (the old Fahrenheit 451 rule), fire tends to preserve clay tablets; some of the oldest writing was not only immune from fire, it was preserved by fire. Having had the opportunity to visit Egypt, I think the modern world should rejoice that there was a shortage of Copts, a shortage of ladders, or an overwhelming abundance of hieroglyphics (probably all of the above): the Copts were only able to scratch out the glyphs they could reach from the ground.

As I mentioned, my event was small potatoes. No rabid brown-shirters joined me to throw books by Hemingway, Jack London, Helen Keller, Thomas Mann, and Heinrich Heine onto the bonfire (a 1933 event that was quietly repeated in the war's aftermath when 300,000 volumes celebrating or tangental to National Socialism were torched by occupying forces). Heine, a brilliant 19th century poet, proclaimed a hundred years before the Third Reich that where they burn books, they will end up burning people, a precept chilling in its prescience.

An interesting area of study would be to determine just when libricide moved from its original goal to totally expunge a written record, much like the success of the Romans to obliterate any vestige of Carthage, to its present aim as a symbolic gesture. I think that Anthony Comstock believed that his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice would endure to ensure that all offending publications could be dealt with as they were discovered. No small potatoes was the fifteen tons of destroyed books, thousands of arrests, and several reputed suicides.

My event was not predicated upon obliteration or symbolism. The material was offensive only to grammarians and a few readers. Simply, someone, somewhere pushed the wrong button, so what began as publication after a final edit became an early draft of a manuscript bound and wrapped by a cover—dozens of them, boxes of them. I'd like to report that the bonfire reached the heavens and left only a pile of ash to be swept away in the breeze, but books don't burn all that well unless the fire exceeds the Bradbury quotient.

Unfortunately, a few readers may have paid good money (kind of redundant I know) for an inferior version of "Low Jinks on the High Seas." If you are one of the few, contact me at chasman@grantsburgtelcom.net and I will make amends.

Happy reading and happy holidays.