A bookstore owner in Kansas City is burning 20,000 books in his collection...because no one wants them. He can't sell them, libraries and thrift shops have turned them down, and he has no room to store them. So up in flames they shall go...
Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.
His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, to obscure titles, like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.
So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.
"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books..."After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through, and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction," he said. "And it's a good excuse for fun."
Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.
I think this is a terrific publicity stunt, for both the bookstore and the cause of reading itself: it's shocking, dramatic, bound to get press around the world, and will certainly increase business to his shop. In fact, it seems to have already done so:
Dozens of other people took advantage of the book-burning, searching through the books waiting to go into the flames for last-minute bargains.
Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son.
"I think, given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it," Bechtel said. "(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it."
I wouldn't go that far. Still, it surprises me that the Kansas City Public Library wouldn't take the collection for a used-book sale. Maybe they will, now that the books are "famous"; there's nothing that can stir demand for something than telling people they can't have it.
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