Who by fire

Book destruction in fact and fiction

Fire engines at the Los Angeles Central Library fire, 1986

A grim side note to the news: when the Getty Center opened in Los Angeles in December 1997, it held an exhibition about fireworks; a complementary book duly appeared (Incendiary Art: The presentation of fireworks in early modern Europe by Kevin Salatino); but no actual fireworks were set off to mark the occasion. I don’t suppose anybody paying attention to current events – or familiar with the seasonal dangers to which LA is prey – would be surprised to hear that.

Nervous questions are being asked about how safe a repository the Getty really is for its unique collection of artworks, although reassuring noises have been made about its state-of-the-art fire defences. In San Marino, meanwhile, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, where there was a small fire caused by a defective light fixture some years ago, has lost a few trees and is closed at the time of writing, but is planning to reopen soon. “Our HVAC systems continue to maintain safe collection storage environments, including the filtering of outside air.”

Not so fortunate was the Palisades Public Library, which burnt to the ground last week. “One more devastating loss for the inhabitants [of this neighbourhood] to come home to”, as somebody remarked on Instagram, “whether their individual homes survived or not.” Likewise, Catherine Kanner of the Melville Press, which produces illustrated fine press limited editions, has lost both her home and “the vast majority of her inventory” to the Pacific Palisades fire. Contributions are sought to support her and enable the reprinting of her latest title, a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

And then, as Colm Tóibín wrote in the London Review of Books, there’s Gary Indiana’s personal library – a collection of books that had stood “three-deep on his shelves” in his East Village apartment. Indiana’s books had the terrible misfortune to arrive at their new home in Altadena just as the winds were rising:

If they – the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured – had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday . . . there was still an address.

It takes a lot to keep books safe. Not only investment and technical know-how, that is: sheer good luck plays its part, too.

(A side note to this side note: the Los Angeles Central Library was well prepared when what seems to have been an incendiary fire broke out on an April morning in 1986. Everyone was out in five minutes; the firefights arrived in another five; the only casualty was someone who tripped over a hose; and although 400,000 volumes were destroyed, “out of over 1.2 million books that were in the library at the time of the fire, only 350,000 received any fire or water damage”.)

The destruction of books probably isn’t the first thing on everyone’s mind in LA right now. While writing this, I’ve learnt that the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, due to take place in early February, has been cancelled: FEMA and the Red Cross have taken over the Pasadena Convention Center in order to evacuate those displaced by the fires, for the coming month.

Under the circumstances, that some books have survived at all seems remarkable. The century-old Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center burnt down; but its thirteen Torahs were rescued, including one “a Sephardic scroll, heavier than the rest, encased in silver etched with the patterns of a long-lost homeland . . . donated by a congregant who [had] fled Iran”. Elsewhere in Pasadena, a rabbi revisiting the rubble of his home apparently has found, of all things, his copy of Sacred Fire (“a collection of essays on the Torah and Jewish holidays by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Grand Rebbe of Piaseczno in Poland”) intact, “in perfect condition” on a pile of ash.

In a similar vein, the BBC has photographs of a woman who returned to her home and found the singed fragment of a page from one of her books. “Whither the Future?”, it reads, above a section on “personal goals”. (She’s standing in the midst of the wreckage of her “dream home”.) “I read a lot of books on self growth and empowerment”, she explains. “This must be a divine message for me to keep going.”

Book destruction has a long history; all too much of it deliberate. Accidental fires are bad enough – one at Sotheby’s, in 1865, obliterated most of the 17,000 annotated (and uninsured) volumes from Alexander Humboldt’s library. When the Turks ransacked the Hungarian royal palace in Buda in 1526, after the victory of Suleiman the Magnificent at the Battle of Mohács, they destroyed and dispersed what had been the “second largest library in Christendom”. In England in the sixteenth century, the Reformation did something comparable to the country’s monastic collections, severing a vital link with the past: “A mid-fourteenth-century archidiaconal survey of the 350 or more churches in the Archdeaconry of Norwich shows them to have had a total of about 4,000 books; not a single one is known to be extant”.

I’m quoting here from essays in Lost Libraries: The destruction of great book collections since Antiquity, edited by James Raven (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). But other books about book destruction are available – see Fahrenheit 451 (1953), by that devout Angeleno Ray Bradbury, for a dystopian-fictional example, or Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary, edited by Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (also Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), for further essays. It would be quite possible to make a gruesome collection of volumes about this unfortunate aspect of bibliography.

Such a collection would have to make room for another, more ambiguous outbreak of fiction, besides Bradbury’s: “The Comte de Marnay”, a short story about a pyrrhic victory by the eminent bookman A. N. L. Munby.

(Do not read on if you resent a spoiler! But do if you don’t mind one by way of a taster/my means of recommending Munby’s recherché fiction.)

Munby’s story tells of a Parisian collector who manages to build up a library that “far surpassed that of many a wealthier collector”. He privately prints a catalogue, and is flattered into presenting a copy to a “young German librarian”, Herr Hofmann, who visits him in the autumn of 1936. He even inscribes the catalogue for his guest: “In remembrance of a pleasant visit from M. Hofmann – an ambassador who does much to dispel the misunderstandings which have existed between our two countries”.

Perhaps you can guess what’s coming next.

The war brings the smug Hofmann back to the Count’s door, this time accompanied by a German army officer. De Marnay’s library is to be “removed to Berlin and housed in the Preussische Staatsbibliothek . . . And if it should occur to you to mislay any of the choicer items, you will perhaps recall that I have a catalogue of it”. The Count considers his situation and decides to act:

A little past midnight a passing police officer noticed smoke pouring from one of the first floor windows. The street door was locked, the concierge away, and there was some delay in forcing an entry. By the time it was effected the upper part of the house was well ablaze and the fire brigade concentrated its energies upon saving the ground floor and the surrounding buildings. By dawn the fire was under control, by midday it was possible to place fire escapes against the gaping windows of the gutted first floor. Herr Hofmann, who had been on the scene since ten o’clock, insisted upon mounting, and he peered into the smouldering ruin within. The floor, which was of stone, had survived, but part of the roof had fallen in, and the chaos was indescribable. He could see enough, however, to be certain that the Count had perished with his library. The little the fire had spared was irretrievably ruined by water. The blackened remnants of manuscripts lay still smoking on the floor, unconsumed fragments lay blistered and scorched, or fantastically warped and crinkled by the firemen’s hoses.

The thwarted Hofmann is left to contemplate writing a report to his superiors. “As they were intolerant of failure, it would require careful drafting.”

ICYMI: On February 4 Pierre Delsaerdt happens to be giving a paper about “book seizures in Belgium and the Netherlands and on the Left Bank of the Rhine during the French Occupation, 1794–1795”. A dose of confiscation to go with the book destruction . . .