I wouldn't attempt a full account of Brian Cummings' professorial lecture at the University of Sussex. As it was entitled Bibliophobia, and the publicity described it as being about book-burning, I expected it to be full of interest for a librarian. Some points, in more or less reverse chronological order:
1988-89: the public burning of copies of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in 1988 and 1989. I take the subtitle of this post from a photograph of a placard displayed at one of those burnings. He cited the burnings on demonstrations in Bradford, though I am sure there were similar actions in London. I worked in Haringey public libraries at the time, where the librarian in charge of acquisitions had death threats from local Muslims.
Photo: Daniel Neugebauer (nick: Energiequant) from Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-2.5 The monument in Bebelplatz.
10 May 1933: Nazi book burning in Berlin and other German cities: authors condemned as inimical to national socialism are publicly burnt in a campaign started by Nazi students and endorsed by Goebbels,
1520: Luther burns the papal bull excommunicating him. The Vatican later sent priests to burn Luther's writings led, in north Germany, by a librarian from the Vatican.
1st century AD: Acts of the Apostles (Acts 19.19) claims that coverts to Christianity burnt their scrolls o 'sorcery' a passage, often cited as a justification for later book burners
3rd Century BC Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang has the works of Confucian scholars burned, and their authors buried alive.
Professor Cummings referred, of course, to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and its cinematic treatment directed by Truffaut. Bradbury got the temperature wrong: paper ignites at 450 Celsius (840 °F)
The professor saw contrasting elements in book-burning, purgative, punitive and festive. Heretics such as Wycliffe and Hus had their works burned at the stake with them; the Nazi book-burnings were supposed to purge Germany of Marxism; the festive element is well illustrated by bonfire night in Lewes or by something I member form a history lesson long ago, taught by John Tanfield, nicknamed Charlie T, who told us, as we started the study of history in our first year at the Perse upper school with local history, of the fires started by the rebels in the Peasants' Revolt in Cambridge. They made a bonfire in the Market Square of papers they found in Great St Mary's church, and a woman known as Mad Margaret danced round it, crying, 'away with the skill of the clerks'.
This discussion of books as physical object made me wonder if physical and historical bibliography are still taught in library schools. The subjects were on the way out when I attended the Polytechnic of North London graduate diploma course in 1983. I doubt if they are taught at all now.
He was thanked elegantly by Eamon Duffy of Cambridge who has written a book on marginalia which I must read, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers.
