'To Keep Rubbish Merely Because It is Printed'

We hold meetings in a conference room furnished with a bookcase as vestigial as an appendix, positioned beneath a wall-mounted computer monitor the size of a queen-size mattress. Shelved in the bookcase, perhaps to enhance the academic atmosphere, are six or eight fugitive volumes. Among them are Who’s Who in America, 47^th edition, 1992-1993, and Modern Quantum Mechanics, 2^nd edition, by J.J. Sakuri and Jim Napolitano. Can one feel pity for inanimate objects? The bookcase and its contents are an assemblage titled “Obsolescence.”

What’s the alternative? No one would buy such books. Though readily available for detection-proof theft, no one has touched them. Science textbooks are notoriously evanescent, outdated before they are printed. I’m a soft touch for books but even I don’t want such titles – no interest, no room. Sir John Collings Squire (1884-1958) was an English poet, critic and editor. He writes in “On Destroying Books”:

“[M]ost people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds its way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to keep rubbish merely because it is printed: it is positively a public duty to destroy it.”

Read the entire essay to discover Squire’s suspense-filled account of getting rid of “books of inferior minor verse.” I’m too sentimental to follow his lead.