I can not believe that you throw away the book!

From the editor. The topic of the books, or rather, the topic of knowledge that they contain, has always been close to ABBYY. We have participated in many digitization projects for book collections, both European and domestic . Therefore, when your editor came across a very unexpected English-language article on the preservation of library books, he immediately had a desire to translate it into Russian and discuss it with you, the readers. The author of the material is a librarian at school.

I can not believe that you throw away the book!

I am a librarian, but not a bibliophile.

Over the past nine years, I have thrown away several thousand books from three libraries and have completely recovered from the blind love of print publications, but nothing in this world can deprive me of attachment to interesting subjects, the written word and English in all its twisted brilliance.
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I managed to recover from the fetishization of prints, from the love of books for the sake of the books themselves. I do not see any point in storing stories that no one is interested in, scientific knowledge, obsolete for decades, reflections on the future, which has never come, information, which left an imprint of reckless racism or sexism of its time. However, first of all, I broke up with the ideas that books simply by virtue of their existence are invaluable wealth that will never lose its usefulness.

Somewhere deep in us lies an instinctive protest against causing any damage to books. When I was a child and painted on the pages of a book, or just casually treated her, my mother scolded me, saying: “Never do this to a book! Books are our friends! ”According to Jewish custom, if a prayer book falls to the floor, it must be lifted and kissed. I myself saw how even not very religious Jews follow this tradition. In our schools and libraries you can see a lot of posters and tablets, preaching the value of books. Even people who never read books at all, decorate their homes with them. The less they like to read, the more likely they are to see entire collections in beautiful leather bindings in their homes. (In my opinion, this is as stupid as if I decided to decorate my house with expensive golf clubs. However, how would I do it? I have no home and there is no free corner - everything is in books.) Books, even if we we do not read them, they deserve our respect and even reverence. Only an ignorant prude can destroy a book. History knows examples of how dangerous and cruel people, who started with the destruction of books, then switched to people. However, this does not mean that there can be no weighty reasons for getting rid of books.

People who disagree with me and other librarians about the ugly, in their opinion, practice of throwing out books, present themselves as heroes of works telling about the destruction of books, like the novel "451 Fahrenheit" or the story of the death of the Library of Alexandria. Maybe they see themselves as selfless monks saving civilization from the invasion of barbarians, and they see me as a ruthless goth who throws into the fire a third copy of The Singing in the Blackthorn. Every time when teachers or students notice in my current school library waste paper containers filled with deregistered volumes, some of them address me with obvious indignation and ask a rhetorical, as they think, question: “As a librarian, you can throw books? ”I have to patiently explain that I throw them away just because I work as a librarian. The librarian gets rid of unnecessary books, because no one but him will dare to do it. And this is necessary to do.

Seeing how sharply some people are protesting against throwing out books, I decided to draw their attention to several glaring copies. In our library there was a book called “Professions for Women”, which talked about anything: about the work of a secretary, piano teacher and stewardess, but, oddly enough, there was not a word about the work of a high school teacher, not to mention work financial analyst in the field of mergers and acquisitions. The anthropology book entitled Human Races explained (on a scientific basis, of course) why some races stand higher than others in the chain of evolution. The author of another work, first published in the 19th century and “boldly” republished in the 1920s, defended the first European colonists in North America. At the same time, in order to diminish the scale of everyday cruelty towards the Indians, the actions of the colonists were presented in the light of good Christian intentions. Most of the discarded books were old, but not all. I put aside two books published in the late 1990s. They were devoted to explaining such a scourge as “the ritual violence of Satanists”, and gave advice to schoolchildren how to protect themselves and their loved ones from it. These were thin hardcover books that you may remember from your own school library. Such publications were used by students in the preparation of reports and contained many illustrations and quotations of experts. They were well written and differed in a thorough presentation of the subject, but they had one rather serious drawback: their authors tried to shed light on crimes that, as has now been proved, were never committed. True, we only learned about this after several innocent people were behind bars on fabricated charges.

I laid out on the subscription table a few such books to inform particularly outraged visitors. At the same time, I knew that I would have to defend my decision to destroy the “school property”. However, it was difficult to assume that every time I tried to “weed out” the library in order to get rid of unnecessary books, I would have to argue almost verbatim about the same thing: “Do you think these books should be on the shelves of the school library?” Long pause a time in which bibliophiles ponder their arguments. Everyone understands that these books have no place in school. And yet: "You can not throw away books!"

“After all, these publications have historical value,” finally argues. “We have to save these books, we just need to mark them so that the children know that they are stored to demonstrate some ideas from our past.”

I answer that the teaching of historiography is not included in the curriculum. This is not in any high school. Yes, and how can I explain to students that this book about African tribes is correct, well-argued and relevant, and the other, written by the missionary’s wife, who painted portraits of native people in their bewitching, though not quite decent, national costumes, is sustained in a scornful tone, outdated and inaccurate? Do I need to put a sticker on it with the appropriate warning?

Usually at this moment schoolchildren bibliophiles lose all interest in further discussion, but teachers continue to persist: “And yet you must not throw them away! Do not forget that there are schools in which libraries there are almost no books left! Libraries that cut the budget! Can't these books be donated, for example, to a school in the city of Paterson? ”Poor school in Paterson. In my opinion, in these arguments, with all their good intentions, there is a condescending attitude towards the less well-off segments of society. As we have already established, such books are capable of doing more harm than good, and do not deserve a place in the funds of our materially prosperous school. However, their transfer to poor children from a school in the city of Paterson will do even more harm, because on the shelves of that library there is nothing more modern - for comparison.

“Believe me,” I reply to my opponents, “these books are not needed by anyone.”

And then at the end of the dispute, there is an inevitable call to sell books on eBay, and send the money to buy new books for school. I wonder how these people imagine the demand for publications, which, as we already understood, cannot even be donated as part of a charity event. However, I was forced to change my mind after seeing schoolchildren and adults who took out these absolutely useless books from waste paper containers and took them home.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked the boy, who, and I know for sure, does not read anything at all.
- So you throw them away, right?
- Yes.
- Then you should not care what I will do with them, right?
He was clearly nervous. He did not want trouble.
- In general, yes. But I'm just curious.
- I'm going to burn them.

Well, this is more understandable. Many teenage boys are pyromania, and the burning of books probably allows them to experience the thrill of violating established prohibitions. But I could not understand what a middle-aged man, a former lawyer who replaced a teacher at my school, would do with dozens of volumes drawn from a container.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked him. It seemed to me that this man had already outgrown the stage of Pyroman passions.
“I'll put them on the shelves in my basement!” He replied with a happy look.
“What will your wife say when they see you with a couple dozen books that no one in their right mind wants to keep at home?”
He winked slyly: "She refuses to go down to the basement and will never know about it."
My sympathies were entirely on the side of the wife of a former lawyer, a substitute for our teacher.

So who loves books more: he or me? For me, the most important thing in the book is its content. For him, the book itself. He thinks that by throwing out inaccurate and outdated publications, I commit a blasphemous act against the civilization itself. And it seems to me that it is he who commits an act of great disrespect for his descendants. After all, they will ever have to deal with all these books in the basement, which no one has ever seen. What makes a book an object of worship, and not just a means of transmitting information?

Each librarian had to answer the annoying phone calls of residents of his city who decided to clean their attics or basements and therefore generously offered the library their covered with mold, damp, dusty or half-decayed books. As it turns out, often these are simply huge collections of long-forgotten mass publications of the 60s and 70s of the last century, printed on the cheapest paper, or collections of issues of National Geographic magazine for 85 years. People ask where you can donate books and magazines to donate to the library. However, many are shocked and offended when they learn that state and school libraries, as a rule, do not accept donations in the form of books that are more than two or three years old. Do we really not want to get a well-preserved collection of 40-year-old best-selling bestsellers that their grandmother read at the time on the beach? And what, in my opinion, they should do with these books, “well, don’t throw them away?” If they have not yet abandoned their undertaking, they invariably ask me if anyone would be interested in this offer in a Paterson school. Poor school in Paterson. To complete this telephone conversation, I propose to go to a hospital or nursing home. However, I have no doubt that there, in turn, someone will definitely advise them to call the library. All this rather strange charitable impulse, in the end, arouses in his initiators a feeling of indignation at the fact that no one wishes to take things for themselves that have lain unnecessary for decades in the basement of their parents. Apparently, it seems to them that libraries are like poor orphans from Dickens’s works and should be grateful even for the meager portion of free porridge offered by a generous stranger, and books are valuable only because they are books, and not at all because of their content or magic feelings arising from the contact of the mind of a talented writer with the consciousness of an enthusiastic reader.

In my opinion, outraged bibliophiles value books much less than they think. Turning all printed matter into a cult object that never loses its practical value (even despite complete uselessness), they actually diminish the ability of books to cause a storm of protest, emotional distress or a rush of romantic feelings in the reader’s mind. If the battered copy of The Dolls Valley, owned by your mother, deserves a place of perpetual storage on the shelves of public libraries just because it was once printed on paper and sealed with a book binding, then what kind of merit can be claimed? "Anna Karenina"?

Civilization is experiencing an alarming historical moment in connection with the attitude to books. As each succeeding generation pays less attention to reading, and the content is growing in digital form, we are increasingly starting to read books as a subject of worship. The guaranteed formula for creating a bestseller in almost any genre (this rule began to operate after the appearance of the first devices for reading electronic books) consists in using a story about a special, magical, ancient and secret manuscript or scroll discovered and decoded by our contemporary, who is alone in the world. understands its true meaning. The less we need books and the less we value them for their intended purpose, the more we idolize their form.

Probably, you have already heard about the new form of applied art called “Alter-book” (Altered book), when the artist takes the old book in a hard cover and by cutting, tearing, drawing, gluing and other methods of work in a mixed technique turns her in something new - in a purse, a box with a secret, a card or a frame for a photo. That is, in a useful subject ...

I must confess that my irritation about bibliophiles, as is often the case with most offenses, is caused by the awareness of my own lack. My husband and children have several thousand books. This is a side effect of five higher education diplomas that my husband and I together have, as well as an excellent collection of children's books for teenage children (they have already come out of the right age for wonderful illustrated editions that have been lovingly selected for them by friends, relatives and adoring parents ), my old habit of buying on sales of household things any book, about the name or author of which I have ever heard, and of course, our general hobby for books. Having saved three entire libraries from useless editions, I now turn to my own collection, from where I can happily throw out obsolete, worn out and simply not meeting our current interests books, but I can’t decide which of the four copies of Hamlet discard, as each of them contains my notes or comments from my husband (Why out of four? University and postgraduate studies, of course. You don't think that every time we read Hamlet, we had the same thoughts?). All horizontal surfaces are made up with books in our home. They are in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the toilet, and in the laundry room. Sometimes I myself would like to hire a librarian who would come to our house and throw out all the unnecessary books. He would certainly know what to do.

Julie Goldberg, 2011

Addition. To hear a radio interview with Julie about “weeding” the library, check out this post . To read other posts on books and libraries on the Perfect Whole blog, click here . Thanks for stopping by!

Update, 02.15.2013
After this essay was read by more than 17 thousand people, and about a hundred people left their comments, I feel a desire to clarify something for those who claim that we should keep books with outdated views and information, since this is part of the historical heritage. Who are we"? Every library?

Indeed, scientists need libraries to keep old books in archives for historical research. However, scientists are unlikely to descend into my school library. After all, its regular visitors are not researchers, but students and teachers. The books I thrown away are not the last copy available to them of the corresponding publication. A school library is not a place where scientists study the views and beliefs of past centuries.

Of course, SOME libraries with appropriate purpose should store archives with ideas, beliefs and views of the past - for history. However, school and most public libraries are not obliged to do this, because no one uses our collections of books for such purposes. Libraries that are not archives should get rid of obsolete books.

Translated by ABBYY Language Services