Talk about an independent bookstore going up in flames. Tom Wayne just had his 15 minutes of Warholian fame. How long he will live in infamy is another story.
You see Tom Wayne has decided to burn all the books he couldn't sell and hide his actions under the umbrella of protest.
He was protesting "what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word." He called it an "act of art."
The burning of books no matter what the motivation can never be a positive. It is ultimately, a selfish act of destruction and to claim that nobody wanted them as a requisite to the burning borders on delusional.
B.N. Guffey over at the Biblio-Technician exposes the absurdity of Wayne's claim that "even local libraries and thrift stores have told him they were full." Apparently, he never even contacted the Kansas City Public Library.
If he was truly concerned about finding homes for the books his energy could of went to mobilizing supporters to get the books to any number of libraries on the Gulf Coast still reeling from Katrina or how about the Kiowa County Public Library in nearby Kansas that was completely obliterated by a recent tornado?
Isn't Wayne really talking about the diminishing support of the independent bookseller?
As I bookseller with an open bookshop in a large American city I understand Tom Wayne's predicament but he is completely misdirected and unclear of what he is protesting.
What he is reacting to and trying to protest is the diminishing support for the independent bookshop in our society and the negative consequences online bookselling has had on the trade. This has nothing to do diminishing support for the printed word, there are more books being sold and published than ever before.
When he says that his act of book burning is a "funeral pyre for thought in America today" he means that the burning is a funeral pyre for all the books that are no longer worth anything due to the massive changes the book trade has undergone in the last 10 years.There are a lot of books you just can't sell anymore but burning them will never get you anywhere.
Kansas City Star article
2 comments:
rubbish. there are many books that were created to be transitory. old textbooks, unpopular self help, dated political science, overstock & remaindered copies of books no one buys. many books should be land filled. Burning may be too public a death for folks, but they should be recycled to make room for the other books. THIS is not a new and radical idea this is how bookselling FUNCTIONS. Go look in any bookstore dumpster - New or used. You will find books. I think burning them is a very respectable end. how does one dispose of an old US flag?
j.
Thanks for the response though maybe the quote you refer to might have been taken out of context. I was talking about the burning of books in protest.
Specifically about Mr. Wayne's actions not whether or not the recycling of books through incineration is a good or bad thing. Of course there are zillions of dead books whose transitory content render them useless and are in need of disposal by any means necessary. This is not about that.
If Wayne was honest about why he was burning them in the first place then I see no problem, burn away, but he wasn't. He got the publicity train behind the notion that this was somehow a protest against the decline of reading in America while it seems to be about a frustrated bookseller trying to come to terms with the changing landscape of bookselling. This was no "act of art" as he calls it. Burning books in protest can never be a positive.
Another question that begs to be asked is why did it take 10 years and 20,000 books to finally realize that "people will not read" the books he was buying!
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