Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary

The book is a common, everyday object, yet its destruction has become overloaded with potent symbolism. 'Book burning' has become a shorthand for barbarism, philistinism and intolerance. But is there another story to be told here, which is lost amid the overheated rhetoric and knee-jerk responses? Book Destruction, a collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists, approaches the fraught topic from a new angle. It sets such dominant attitudes and platitudes alongside an important but occluded counter-narrative, addressing the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age. What are the motivations and reasons for these acts, and what cultural meanings have been attached to them? How does destruction relate to recycling, reuse, to collage and quotation? When do acts of destruction become moments of creativity? A surprising new picture emerges of a wide range of practices, undertaken in diverse contexts and for different ends.

Gill Partington writes and researches on the material text, reading and readers, and the shifting constructions of fictional and real worlds. She has published on diverse topics including German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, book-burning, fictional spaces in contemporary literature, and humous.

Adam Smyth teaches English Literature at Ballol College, Oxford University, UK, where he specialises in early modern writing and the history of the book (1450-1660). His books include Autobiography in Early Modern England ( 2010).

List of Illustrations
Notes on the contributors
Introduction; Adam Smyth and Gill Partington
PART I: BURNING
1. Burning Sex Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin; Heike Bauer
2. Burning to Read: Ben Jonson's library fire of 1623; Adam Smyth
PART II: MUTILATING
3. From Books to Skoob; Or, Media theory with a Circular Saw; Gill Partington
4. The Complete Works of Franz Kafka Burned [interview]; Ross Birrell
PART III: DOCTORING
5. Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates, and Graffiti: Dorothy Helbarton's Book; Anthony Bale
6. Doctoring Victorian Literature: A Humument [interview]; Tom Phillips
PART IV: DEGRADING
7. 'Miss Cathy's riven th' back off 'Th' Helmet uh Salvation'': Representing Book Destruction in Mid-Victorian Print Culture; Stephen Colclough
8. Waste Matters: Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling; Heather Tilley
PART V: DEFORMING/RESHAPING
9. Aesthetics of Book Destruction; Kate Flint
10. Kindle: Recyling and the future of the book [interview]; Nicola Dale
Bibliography
Index