Too Few Books, Too Many Books

Why do some folks collect books and others burn them?

A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE DESTRUCTION OF BOOKS

From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq

By Fernando Báez

Translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam | Atlas & Co. 354 pp. $25

BOOKS

A Memoir

By Larry McMurtry | Simon & Schuster. 259 pp. $24

With friends of literature like this, who needs enemies?

Isn't it enough that books are under assault by a zombie armada of Facebook, PDA's, iPods, iPhones and Nintendo DS's? Did Fernando Báez and Larry McMurtry have to write books, ostensibly celebrating books, that are so stultifying to read that they make almost any other activity -- even a few aimless hours spent cyber-touring Webkinz World -- seem more engrossing? Taken together, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books and Books: A Memoir deliver a one-two punch of New Age mysticism and cowboy cornpone that just about decks any viable defense of bibliophilia.

Let's start with Báez's migraine-trigger of a book. As his title indicates, Báez seeks to chronicle the multitudinous ways books have been destroyed over the millennia. Starting in 4,100 B.C. with ancient Sumer and picking his way through the tablet smashings, papyrus shreddings, book burnings and library pillagings of the Hittites, Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Vikings, Turks, Crusaders, conquistadors, Nazis and communists (among others), Báez ends this encyclopedic tour of the Inferno with the recent destruction of over a million books in the National Library in Baghdad.

The death toll is, indeed, staggering. Báez, who spent 12 years researching this history, keeps up a page-by-page tally of annihilation. Here's a sampling: "Even the most optimistic estimates calculate that 75 percent of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and science has been lost." Fast forward a few dozen centuries or so to World War II: "The Commission for Jewish-European Cultural Reconstruction determined in 1933 that there were 469 collections of Jewish books. . . . At the end of the war, not even one-quarter of those books remained."

A big problem with A Universal History is that the destruction is just so, well, universal that after a few chapters a reader simply can't ingest any more oblivion. And while it's interesting to speculate about the books that have been lost (the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, on comedy, is the most famous lacuna in literary history), it's hard to muster sympathy for so much that's unknown: looted family archive tablets from Ancient Ur, the vanished library of Roman book collector Serenus Sammonicus and so on and so on. Báez, though, mourns all. In his introduction, he enumerates the myriad ways books can be destroyed and mystically concludes: