Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (review)

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book," wrote John Milton in his spirited essay "Areopagitica" in defense of press freedom some 360 years ago. He was perhaps the first writer to suggest a kinship between the destruction of books and the destruction of human beings. Although the single-word title of this monograph—Libricide—is a relatively recent coinage in the English language, dating back only about a century and a half, the phenomenon of intentional library destruction is of great antiquity. Perhaps since the beginning of writing libraries have been destroyed not only by natural cataclysm but also due to vandalism, misplaced political or religious concerns, reciprocity, carelessness, and overzealous bigotry. Two sobering examples are the burning of the national libraries of Canada and of the United States during the War of 1812.

In this volume author Rebecca Knuth, a professor in the library and information science program at the University of Hawaii, invokes that single word libricide for her theme. After summarily disposing in her first few pages of the longer history of desultory library destruction, she goes into detailed accounts of recent purposeful library depredations (those of the last three-score years or so) involving ideology-driven, regime-sponsored, systematic destruction of book collections intended to bring about the suppression of an entire populace, culture, and/or political will. Hers is a sobering story indeed.

The main burden of Knuth's study begins with the destruction of sixteen thousand books ripped out of the Jewish community center in Frankfurt during theso-called Kristallnacht violence in 1933. It then continues in great detail through the subsequent dozen years of Nazi attempts to assure that "the entire memory [of Judaism as documented] . . . in its books and libraries, was in German [i.e.,non-Jewish] hands[,] . . . serving as archaic documents of a lost culture" (86).

In subsequent chapters the author links other politically motivated efforts todestroy books and libraries elsewhere in the world in support of broader attemptsat genocide or ethnocide. Her second chapter documents in considerable detailefforts to use libricide as a prime weapon in the struggle for the political domination of greater Serbia. Subsequent chapters then report seriatim on more recent libricidal activities still ongoing in the Middle East. The author then proceeds to Mao's Revolution in China (an account that seems to this reviewer to be chronologically misplaced) as well as to other subsequent struggles in war-torn Tibet and Laos.

Although this is not a pleasant book to read, Knuth is a careful scholar and an engaging writer. Of the three recent books on this same general theme read by this reviewer, hers is easily the most thorough and compelling. It is comprehensively researched, fully documented, and well annotated.