Vanessa Rudman|Published
There is something particularly violent about burning a book. Perhaps it is because a book seems such a gentle, innocent thing. It is paper, ink and someone's thoughts and dreams, bound together and left quietly on a shelf until somebody chooses to open it.
Yet, for thousands of years, people have been frightened enough of what might happen when somebody does open one that they have tried countless times to destroy manuscripts.
Long before books could be printed by the thousand, they were painstakingly, lovingly copied by hand, often in monasteries where monks and other scribes could spend months producing a single manuscript.
Books were precious, treasured things, but they were also frighteningly vulnerable. When only a handful of copies of a work existed, destroying them could mean destroying the words themselves.
Press ahead
Then, in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg changed the rules.
His printing press helped take books out of the hands of the wealthy, clergy and educated and, eventually, put them into the hands of ordinary people. But it also made ideas much more difficult to kill.
Once hundreds of copies of a book could be produced, destroying one was no longer enough. Somewhere, somebody else might have another, and they could pass it on.
Printing also allowed ideas to spread faster and further than ever before, including those that challenged religious and political authority. Censorship became more organised as books multiplied, with printers controlled, books seized and lists compiled of works people were not supposed to read.
The Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Prohibited Books, became perhaps the best-known example, listing works Catholics were forbidden to read for centuries.
Forbidden fruit
There is, of course, a problem with telling curious people that they absolutely must not read something. It makes some of us want to read it immediately.
As books became harder to eradicate completely, burning them increasingly became symbolic, a public declaration that certain ideas, and sometimes the people behind them, were unacceptable.
In May 1933, students in university towns across Nazi Germany threw tens of thousands of books considered "un-German" onto bonfires. Jewish writers were targeted alongside pacifists and writers associated with socialism and communism. In Berlin, around 40,000 people gathered as approximately 20,000 volumes were burned.
There were speeches, torchlit processions and bands. This wasn't simply disposing of unwanted books – it was an attempt to kill theatre, and yet the words survived.
Closer to home
South Africa has its own long history of trying to make books disappear. Apartheid created an enormous censorship machinery under which books could be banned, prevented from being imported and removed from library shelves, and sometimes they really were burned.
During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, thousands of banned books and magazines were destroyed in furnaces around the country. Former State Library director Piet Westra later recalled supervising a truckload of books and magazines taken from Pretoria Central Police Station to the Iscor steelworks, where a mechanical shovel dropped them into a 20-metre-high furnace.
Among the books burned was Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a society in which books are outlawed and burned; you can’t make this stuff up.
South African writers weren't spared. André Brink's Kennis van die Aand became the first Afrikaans literary work to be banned, while Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter was banned in 1979 after being deemed, among other things, a threat to state security.
Still burning
Today, we don't necessarily need a match to make a book disappear. It can be prevented from being published or imported, removed from a school or library, restricted by law or made inaccessible online.
The technology changes, as do the arguments and the people deciding what is dangerous, but the impulse to decide what somebody else should be allowed to read has proved remarkably persistent.
Perhaps that is because reading is so wonderfully, intensely private. Nobody standing beside you can control what happens once you open a book.
You can disagree with it, be appalled by it, learn from it, laugh at it, put it down after three pages because it is dreadful, or let it change your mind.
A manuscript could once disappear forever in a fire. A printed book could have hundreds of siblings and, today, a book may have millions of physical and digital copies scattered around the world.
The easier books became to reproduce, the harder they became to destroy. When you share the love of reading, read widely and greedily, question anyone who tells you what you shouldn't read, and pass your best-loved books on, you thwart the book burners.
And you may just find something wonderful between the covers.
* Vanessa Rudman has been in the book industry, managing retail outlets for almost three decades, and recently opened Books & Collectables.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL.