Books are destroyed to prioritize some forms of information over another, in a physical rather than intellectual erasure of the ideas contained within.

Books are burned to consolidate power after war and conquest, to erase history, to root out heresy, ‘to prevent disorder and the spread of foreign customs’, to express victimization,

Books are dropped in the tub because they cannot be protected from our own interest in them, or our distraction.

Books also suffer from the ‘slow fire’ of acidic pages eating themselves into brittleness. Whereas from the16th to mid-19th century, paper was mostly made from recycled from rags, bedsheets, and sails, the paper industry produced mass quantities of pulp by battering fresh tree logs with acid.

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Diogenes was “suspicious of abstractions an education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life.

He was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon”.

Jenny Odell