Book Box | On building libraries and burning books

Dear Reader,

I am at the David Sassoon Library in Mumbai. Walking up the newly renovated wide staircase with its burnished balustrades and gleaming brass carvings, past a marble statue of the founder David Sassoon, 19th century city businessman and Baghdadi Jew, I am in awe.

Upstairs is a high-ceilinged Gothic reading room, its chandeliers arching over emerald lamps on every teakwood desk. There are bolted bookcases around the room: the library building has been renovated and is open to the public, but the lending library will take a few months to open, the security guard on the ground floor tells me. I pay him ₹10 and he hands me a form to apply for library membership, it is an annual fee of ₹8000, he says.

Driving back to my home in Juhu, over the Arabian Sea, on the Bandra Worli Sea Link, my phone pings.

The notification that appears shocks me.

It is a social media report of rioters in France, upset over the death of a teenage boy, burning a library down. A library has burnt to embers, reports the Guardian, in the city of Metz in France. In Marseilles also, a library was attacked and suffered some damage.

The news of burning books cuts so quick, that there has been an avalanche of indignation and upset, as well as a conflagration of fact and fabrication, as protests go viral.

The stories shake me. I go back to images of bonfires of books, in scenes in Balzac and the Little Seamstress (by Dai Sijie), a powerful novella set in China during the Cultural revolution. It’s the story of two teenage boys who are sent to a village for re-education. All the books have been burnt, but the boys find a suitcase full of forbidden Western classics that somehow escaped the fire. What follows is simply written, yet so stark.

What is it about books and burning that burns deep into our collective psyche, I wonder?

The morning after the news, I am driven to find out.

I begin my search by picking up Library: An Unquiet History by Mathew Battles, a history of libraries, that begin with the clay tablets in Mesopotamian libraries and the libraries of the Aztecs to Harvard University’s Widener Library.

Reading this book, I discover a word for the wanton destruction of libraries and books: biblioclasm. It has a long history.

“Bookburning wasn’t invented in the twentieth century, of course; it stalks the history of the library from Alexandria to Tenochtitlan, from Cappadocia to Catalonia, from China’s Qinn dynasty to the dissolution of the English monastries,” writes Battles.

“Libraries are as much about losing the truth — satisfying the inner barbarians of princes, presidents and pretenders — as about discovering it. The loss of libraries is often enough the product of the fear, ignorance and greed of their supposed benefactors and protectors. The wilful ineptitude of bureaucracies throughout history plays its role as well,” he writes and I can’t help but think of the many thousands of books that have been destroyed in these ways, over the years in many libraries.

The next day, I pick The Library Book by Susan Orlean, best known for her amazing non-fiction, The Orchid Thief. In The Library Book, Orlean finds herself obsessed by the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library Fire. As she investigates the mystery of the arsonist and their motives, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens to tell the story of all libraries: their significance as a community hub, their history, their meaning and their uncertain future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.

I read The Library Book all day, and in the car as I commute to the college I teach at. Night falls by the time I get home. I am alone, the girls are away at work in different cities now, and their father is travelling. The cook has left dinner for me on the table — a dish of dal and rice and fried ladyfinger. I am hungry, so I read and eat though it feels sacrilegious, as the librarians in the LA library are battling post fire trauma. The fire has reduced the library to a wreckage without books. Thousands of books have been damaged by both the fire and the heavy water sprinklers that fought to quench the flames.

The most haunting fire

Before drifting off to sleep, my thoughts wander to the most haunting fire of them all—the inferno in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. This dystopian novel takes its name from the temperature at which paper burns, and it tells the story of Guy Montag, a firefighter tasked with the ironic duty of burning books. It’s a chilling tale, yet one that offers a glimmer of hope, as we see Guy transforming into a true firefighter.

The following morning, I awake with a sense of optimism. I recall Neil Gaiman’s words on the future of reading and libraries. A internet search leads me to the transcript of his speech. I reread it, highlighting every other sentence. Here are three of the many sentences I marvel at:

“But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication…(A library) is a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.”

Now, I turn to you, dear reader. What is your favourite library, and what is it that you cherish about it? Please do share your thoughts. And in the meantime, here are some hacks to build your own home library, as well as six steps to set up a library in your workplace.

Next week, I look back on the last six months of reading and bring you my best books of the first half of 2023.

Until then, happy reading!

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading requests or suggestions, write to her at [email protected]

The views expressed are personal

Dear Reader,

PREMIUM

I am at the David Sassoon Library in Mumbai. Walking up the newly renovated wide staircase with its burnished balustrades and gleaming brass carvings, past a marble statue of the founder David Sassoon, 19th century city businessman and Baghdadi Jew, I am in awe.

Upstairs is a high-ceilinged Gothic reading room, its chandeliers arching over emerald lamps on every teakwood desk. There are bolted bookcases around the room: the library building has been renovated and is open to the public, but the lending library will take a few months to open, the security guard on the ground floor tells me. I pay him ₹10 and he hands me a form to apply for library membership, it is an annual fee of ₹8000, he says.

Driving back to my home in Juhu, over the Arabian Sea, on the Bandra Worli Sea Link, my phone pings.

The notification that appears shocks me.

It is a social media report of rioters in France, upset over the death of a teenage boy, burning a library down. A library has burnt to embers, reports the Guardian, in the city of Metz in France. In Marseilles also, a library was attacked and suffered some damage.

The news of burning books cuts so quick, that there has been an avalanche of indignation and upset, as well as a conflagration of fact and fabrication, as protests go viral.

The stories shake me. I go back to images of bonfires of books, in scenes in Balzac and the Little Seamstress (by Dai Sijie), a powerful novella set in China during the Cultural revolution. It’s the story of two teenage boys who are sent to a village for re-education. All the books have been burnt, but the boys find a suitcase full of forbidden Western classics that somehow escaped the fire. What follows is simply written, yet so stark.

What is it about books and burning that burns deep into our collective psyche, I wonder?

The morning after the news, I am driven to find out.

I begin my search by picking up Library: An Unquiet History by Mathew Battles, a history of libraries, that begin with the clay tablets in Mesopotamian libraries and the libraries of the Aztecs to Harvard University’s Widener Library.

Reading this book, I discover a word for the wanton destruction of libraries and books: biblioclasm. It has a long history.

“Bookburning wasn’t invented in the twentieth century, of course; it stalks the history of the library from Alexandria to Tenochtitlan, from Cappadocia to Catalonia, from China’s Qinn dynasty to the dissolution of the English monastries,” writes Battles.

“Libraries are as much about losing the truth — satisfying the inner barbarians of princes, presidents and pretenders — as about discovering it. The loss of libraries is often enough the product of the fear, ignorance and greed of their supposed benefactors and protectors. The wilful ineptitude of bureaucracies throughout history plays its role as well,” he writes and I can’t help but think of the many thousands of books that have been destroyed in these ways, over the years in many libraries.

The next day, I pick The Library Book by Susan Orlean, best known for her amazing non-fiction, The Orchid Thief. In The Library Book, Orlean finds herself obsessed by the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library Fire. As she investigates the mystery of the arsonist and their motives, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens to tell the story of all libraries: their significance as a community hub, their history, their meaning and their uncertain future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.

I read The Library Book all day, and in the car as I commute to the college I teach at. Night falls by the time I get home. I am alone, the girls are away at work in different cities now, and their father is travelling. The cook has left dinner for me on the table — a dish of dal and rice and fried ladyfinger. I am hungry, so I read and eat though it feels sacrilegious, as the librarians in the LA library are battling post fire trauma. The fire has reduced the library to a wreckage without books. Thousands of books have been damaged by both the fire and the heavy water sprinklers that fought to quench the flames.

The most haunting fire

Before drifting off to sleep, my thoughts wander to the most haunting fire of them all—the inferno in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. This dystopian novel takes its name from the temperature at which paper burns, and it tells the story of Guy Montag, a firefighter tasked with the ironic duty of burning books. It’s a chilling tale, yet one that offers a glimmer of hope, as we see Guy transforming into a true firefighter.

The following morning, I awake with a sense of optimism. I recall Neil Gaiman’s words on the future of reading and libraries. A internet search leads me to the transcript of his speech. I reread it, highlighting every other sentence. Here are three of the many sentences I marvel at:

“But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication…(A library) is a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.”

Now, I turn to you, dear reader. What is your favourite library, and what is it that you cherish about it? Please do share your thoughts. And in the meantime, here are some hacks to build your own home library, as well as six steps to set up a library in your workplace.

Next week, I look back on the last six months of reading and bring you my best books of the first half of 2023.

Until then, happy reading!

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading requests or suggestions, write to her at [email protected]

The views expressed are personal