Too Few Books, Too Many Books
Why do some folks collect books and others burn them?

Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan
Sunday, October 19, 2008

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:

"We should consider as well how many books have been destroyed because they weren't published. . . . how many books were left behind on the beach, in the subway, on a park bench. It's hard to respond to these disquieting thoughts, but the truth is that at this very moment, while you read these lines, at least one book disappears forever."

One person's fetishistic disquiet is another person's relief. Do all books deserve to be published and preserved? Even the lousy ones?

Larry McMurtry might dang well say, "Yup." As a lifelong book collector, scout and bookstore owner (and author of such whopping hit novels as Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove), McMurtry has scooped up everything from comics to pulp fiction to fine editions of Mark Twain to volumes of travel books written by women. Although he grew up in a bookless household during the Great Depression, he now owns a personal library of more than 28,000 volumes.

Don't expect to get much insight, however, into his passion for literature here. For a guy who's made a tidy living by storytelling, he can barely be bothered to exhale a narrative: Chapters run three pages long -- or fewer -- and the plotline of his reminiscences about booksellers he's known and customers he's served simply evaporates like spittle on a hot coal.

For some 36 years, McMurtry and his partner, Marcia Carter, ran Booked Up in Georgetown, a collectible and rare books shop that has since moved to Archer City, Tex. In the golden days of the store's tenure on M Street, Alice Roosevelt Longworth dropped in (for mysteries), and twice a year so did a guy with a ruler who'd measure books on the shelves and buy at least $2,000 worth of the smaller volumes. Then there was the day a homeless girl with a bloody foot turned up at the store. "We got her medical attention," recalls McMurtry, "and she easily survived, after which we learned that she was a descendant of Button Gwinnett, whose signature is the most elusive of all the signers of our Declaration of Independence."

Huh? If you've ever been a captive audience of free-form anecdotes on a plane ride, you know how exasperating the experience is. Such stories are not entertaining enough to merit the telling, and yet they contain so many narrative holes that they maddeningly nag at a listener or reader. How does one's descent from Button Gwinnett come up in casual conversation over a bloody foot? Since the girl was homeless, how does McMurtry even know her odd claim was reliable? And why, why, why is he filling up this slim memoir with such ephemera?

To be fair, McMurtry does tell one great yarn here about the day he was appraising a library in Northwest Washington and stumbled upon a working copy of The Whale, the English version of Moby-Dick. The copy turned out to have belonged to a minor English writer, Charles Reade, who took on the burden of abridging Moby-Dick for English audiences. Opening the volume, McMurtry saw that Reade took up his duties on page one: "He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through 'Call me Ishmael.' "

If he had about 20 more anecdotes like that one, McMurtry would have been able to compose a nice little memoir about a life in books. No matter. As a brand-name bestselling author, he has probably already bought a few more truckloads of rare books to add to his library with the advance he received for this trifle. And if Fernando Báez is to be believed, the world would be the poorer if Books: A Memoir had never been published. ·

Maureen Corrigan is book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air" and author of the literary memoir "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."