“Who wants yesterday’s papers, who wants yesterday’s girls,” sang the Rolling Stones, the grand old men of rock, back in the Swinging Sixties when they were in their twenties. Newspapers always had a sell-by date. And so do books.
That’s not news to Singaporeans who will remember National Library Board fire sales of old books. Yours truly remembers standing in a long queue in a cavernous hall and picking up a couple of dog-eared bestsellers for a song. Now they are gathering dust somewhere on these premises, which have been their second home ever since they were turned out of the library. Wheel out the old, bring in the new—that seems to be the library’s policy. And that’s fine by us book lovers on a budget, always eager for fresh material.
Libraries dumping books, flogging them in fire sales, we can understand. But libraries pulping books? Destroying them? Isn’t that like a scribe or a monk—the original guardians of manuscripts in medieval Europe—turning into Attila the Hun?
What makes the act all the more odious is that the books were laid to waste by a university — an institution meant to preserve them.
Granted that Yale-NUS College will be shutting down this year, but did its library books have to be pulped? Couldn’t they be given away? Did they have to be destroyed? Some of the college alumni were upset that a recycling company was called in to dispose of the books instead of these being offered to former students.
The university librarian told the media that “excess books” were offered only to the faculty and not to the students. Why not? The reports didn’t say.
“Operational lapse”
The librarian apologised for the “operational lapse”. Yes, that was the phrase used—the destruction of books reduced to an operational lapse.
However, book lovers will be happy to know that not all the books were destroyed. According to the librarian, the majority of the books were “rehomed” in other National University of Singapore (NUS) libraries. About 8,500 still remain, and these will be on offer at two book fairs — one for the alumni and one for the public.
Students who saw the recycling company employees loading books onto a truck on May 20 tried to stop them, but couldn’t.
In the subsequent brouhaha, according to news reports, NUS tried to stop the recycling. But, by then, it was too late.
Were the books shredded or incinerated, torn to pieces or burnt? That the reports did not say.
Fahrenheit 451
Paper is easily torn, pages ripped off a book or a notebook, but it takes intense heat to burn them—Fahrenheit 451, to recall the title of Ray Bradbury’s famous novel about book-burning.
Bradbury depicts an authoritarian world where books are burnt to stamp out free thinking, and book lovers memorise books to preserve them. Montag, the hero, learns the Book of Ecclesiastes by heart and meets others who have similarly memorised Jonathan Swift, Charles Darwin, Schopenhauer, Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha. “We’re book-burners, too,” says one of them. “We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found.” “Best to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it,” he explains.
The value placed on books in the novel reflects the author’s own personality. “I have been a library person all of my life,” Bradbury wrote in his foreword to the novel
Now contrast that with the “recycling” of an NUS college library’s books — an action not without precedent. “Books which are not taken up are then sent for recycling, in line with common library practices,” said the university librarian. A pity.