On Destroying Books

It says in the paper that over two million volumes have been presented to the troops by the public. It would be interesting to inspect them. Most of them, no doubt, are quite ordinary and suitable; but it was publicly stated the other day that some people were sending the oddest things, such as magazines twenty years old, guides to the Lake District and back numbers of Whitaker's Almanac. In some cases, one imagines, such indigestibles get into the parcels by accident; but it is likely that there are those who jump at the opportunity of getting rid of books they don't want.

Why have they kept them if they didn't want them? But most people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that one knows, every worthless volume that is bought finds its way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to keep rubbish merely because it is printed; it is positively a public duty to destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more room for new books but saves one's heirs the trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it.

But it is not always easy to destroy books. They may not have as many lives as a cat, but they certainly die hard; and it is sometimes difficult to find a scaffold for them. This difficulty once brought me almost within the shadow of the Rope. I was living in a small and (as Shakespeare would say) heaven-kissing flat in Chelsea, and books of inferior minor verse gradually accumulated there until at last I was faced with the alternative of either evicting the books or else leaving them in sole, undisturbed tenancy and taking rooms elsewhere for myself.

Now no one would have bought these books. I therefore had to throw them away or wipe them off the map altogether. But how? There were scores of them. I had no kitchen range, and I could not toast them on the gas cooker or consume them leaf by leaf in my small study fire, for it is almost as hopeless to try to burn a book without opening it as to try to burn a piece of granite. So in the end I determined to do to them what so many people do to kittens: tie them up and consign them to the river. I improvised a sack, stuffed the books into it, put it over my shoulder, and went down the stairs into the darkness.

It was nearly midnight as I stepped into the street. There was a cold nip in the air, the sky was full of stars, and the greenish-yellow lamps threw long gleams across the smooth, hard road. Few people were about, and here and there rang out the steps of late travelers on the way home across the bridge to Battersea. I turned up my overcoat collar, settled my sack comfortably across my shoulders, and strode off towards the little square glow of the coffee stall which marked the near end of the bridge, whose sweeping iron girders were just visible against the dark sky behind.

A few doors down I passed a policeman who was flashing his lantern on the catches of basement windows. He turned. I fancied he looked suspicious, and I trembled slightly. The thought occurred to me: 'Perhaps he suspects I have swag in this sack.' I was not seriously disturbed as I knew that I could bear investigation, and that nobody would be suspected of having stolen such goods (though they were all first editions) as I was carrying. Nevertheless I could not help the slight unease which comes to all who are eyed suspiciously by the police, and to all who are detected in any deliberately furtive act, however harmless. He acquitted me apparently, and with a step that, making an effort, I prevented from growing more rapid, I walked on until I reached the Embankment.

It was then that all the implications of my act revealed themselves. I leaned against the parapet and looked down into the faintly luminous swirls of the river. Suddenly I heard a step near me; quite automatically I sprang back from the wall and began walking on with, I fervently hoped, an air of rumination and unconcern. The pedestrian came by me without looking at me. It was a tramp, who had other things to think about; and, calling myself an ass, I stopped again. 'Now for it,' I thought; but just as I was preparing to cast my books upon the waters I heard another step—a slow and measured one. The next thought came like a blaze of terrible blue lightning across my brain: 'What about the splash?' A man leaning at midnight over the Embankment wall; a sudden fling of his arms; a great splash in the water. Surely, and not without reason, whoever was within sight and hearing (and there always seemed to be some one near) would instantly rush at me, seize me, and accuse me of throwing a baby.

So I walked up and down, increasingly fearful of being watched, summoning up my courage to take the plunge and quailing from it at the last moment. At last I did it. In the middle of Chelsea Bridge there are projecting circular bays with seats in them. In my agony of decision I left the Embankment and hastened straight for the first of these. When I reached it I knelt on the seat. Looking over, I hesitated again. But I had reached the turning point. 'What!' I thought to myself, 'under the resolute mask that you show your friends is there really a shrinking and contemptible coward? If you fall now, you must never hold your head up again.' I took a heave. The sack dropped. A vast splash. Then silence again. No one came. I turned home; and as I walked I thought a little sadly of all those books falling into the cold torrent, settling slowly down through the pitchy dark, and landing at last on the ooze of the bottom, there to lie forlorn and forgotten whilst the unconscious world of men went on.