THEY DON’T BURN BOOKS ANYMORE

Why don’t they burn books anymore?

It’s too much bother. Why organise a bonfire, gather a mob, make speeches and strike dramatic poses when people will quietly dispose of books themselves?

Nowadays unwanted books are placed in cardboard boxes beside the rubbish bins or in those little wooden libraries nailed to garden fences, where they sit patiently beneath a handwritten sign that says FREE. Nothing alarms modern consumers more than the word free. If the books were marked ‘$50 each,’ someone might take a quick look. Steal one, even! But free? There must be something wrong with them.

Inside these little libraries you’ll usually find twelve copies of The Da Vinci Code, three abandoned vegan cookbooks, a soggy biography of Margaret Thatcher, a thriller by an author nobody admits reading, and perhaps a neglected Dickens or Orwell looking slightly embarrassed to be there.

No flames. No outrage. Just slow abandonment.

Why wrestle with Tolstoy when your phone can deliver a dozen conspiracy theories, four miracle diets, an AI willing to write your love letters – or death wishes, and an endless procession of cats falling off refrigerators, dogs interrupting weddings and influencers explaining the correct way to peel a banana? Civilization has made remarkable progress. It has streamlined the reading process by removing most of the reading. You don’t have to type your emails now. Speak into the mike and the words flow across the page like the endless streams of black ants you might find disguised in a Salvador Dalí painting.

Bookshops are becoming as rare as phone boxes. The survivors resemble wildlife sanctuaries where endangered readers wander quietly between the shelves, whispering to each other so as not to disturb the last remaining copies of Kafka and Camus. The owners greet customers with the subdued optimism of priests who know they are dealing in a product that requires a quality that no longer exists – concentration.

Burn Baby Burn

Books have always had enemies. According to history, one of the earliest large-scale book burnings took place in China around 213 BCE, when Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, ordered books destroyed in an effort to consolidate power. Fire, it turned out, was an effective editor.

More than two thousand years later, the Nazis perfected the public relations version of the same idea. On 10 May 1933, university students and officials gathered in Berlin’s Opernplatz – today’s Bebelplatz – and in towns across Germany to throw books onto bonfires. Nothing says ‘we are confident in our ideas’ quite like setting fire to someone else’s.

America has had its moments too. In 1973, a school board in North Dakota ordered copies of Slaughterhouse-Five and Deliverance burned. More recently, books have been removed from school libraries and classrooms in various states. To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby and Orwell’s 1984 have all found themselves on lists of books someone decided other people should not read. In 1981, 1984 was banned in Jackson County, Florida, over ‘concerns about its political content.’

The irony is wonderfully human. A novel warning about censorship was censored.

Perhaps burning books has become old-fashioned because the mechanism of control has changed. The modern world has discovered that there are methods far more efficient than bonfires. Why burn a book when you can bury it beneath ten million TicTok reels? Why ban a novel when you can convince people they no longer have the attention span to read one? Why silence an author when algorithms can quietly ensure that hardly anyone encounters the author’s work in the first place? The perfect censorship isn’t destroying a book. It’s making it invisible.

The internet, of course, is wonderfully resistant to the notion of book burning. Delete one website and another appears. Remove a file and someone uploads three more. Information now leans towards shapeshifting, transforming, turning truth to trash. But abundance creates its own paradox. When everything is available, almost nothing receives sustained attention. The problem is no longer scarcity of information; it is an excess of distraction.

Fahrenheit 451

Then there is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which paper burns), the most famous novel ever written about burning books. In Bradbury’s future, firemen no longer extinguish fires – they start them, hunting down hidden libraries and reducing them to ash in the name of public happiness. It is difficult to imagine a clearer warning.

The unintended irony is that Fahrenheit 451 has itself been removed from school reading lists, even published in a censored edition with supposedly offensive words quietly deleted. A novel about censorship was censored. Bradbury could hardly have asked for a better demonstration of his argument.

Bradbury understood something that still unsettles us. The greatest danger was never that governments would burn every book. It was that one day we would stop opening them ourselves.

The old dictators feared books because they knew ideas were dangerous. The modern world has stumbled upon something even more effective than censorship – indifference. They don’t burn books anymore. Fire is expensive, environmentally questionable, and liable to upset the neighbours. Besides, why destroy a book when you can simply leave it in a little wooden box on someone’s garden fence with a sign saying FREE?

The rain will finish the job.