Fuel to the Fire: Book Burning in History

 

 In June of 2022, a specially designed fireproof copy of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood was auctioned for $130,000 USD to support PEN America’s efforts to fight book bans. A delightfully over-the-top promotional video shows Atwood blasting the book with a flamethrower, from which it emerges unscathed. While constructing all future books out of heat-resistant aluminum and space-age steel wouldn’t actually solve any problems, the fireproof book is an act of defiance against that recurring symbol of fear and anti-intellectualism, the bonfire. It announces that the written word can always adapt to outlast the forces that would try and destroy it.

Looking to history supports this claim. Despite sustaining irrecoverable losses over the millennia, literature has survived, and while fireproof editions may be the latest innovation in this long conflict, past societies made many innovations of their own. Let’s take a look at some ways in which texts of the past have been saved from the flames.

In the ancient world, a library itself can be considered a remarkable feat of the imagination. A prospect first available only to royalty, the gathering together of texts for their protection and study has remained a cornerstone of the literary world. The library of Ashurbanipal, king of the Assyrian Empire in the 7th century BCE, has been called by H. G. Wells "the most precious source of historical material in the world," and contained within its collection the legendary Epic of Gilgamesh. Ashurbanipal, a lover of literature, collected tablets from across his empire for preservation in his great library. Unfortunately, he was also a cruel and iron-fisted military leader of an empire hungry for growth. He used his empire’s expansion as a means to expand his collection, taking for his own the recorded knowledge of his vassal states until they eventually stage a rebellion, setting fire to the library in 612 BCE. Ironically, the heat of the fire baked the clay tablets stored inside, allowing them to be preserved for our viewing today. However, the wax boards, leather scrolls, papyrus, and other texts were destroyed. The knowledge of the library, conscripted by those in power, was forever lost to those to whom it belonged.

With the advent of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, book burning in Europe reached a fevered height. Martin Luther and the Catholic Church both used book burning as a political tool to alter public opinion. The efficacy of the printing press made complete eradication of controversial texts almost impossible, but both sides sought to utilize public book burnings to convey the ideological incompatibility between the old and the new. Rather than to institutions of church or state, it fell to private citizens, wealthy antiquarians, to preserve the endangered writings of the time. Even a single manuscript tucked away on a shelf can carry its knowledge to the future, its messages alive and well. Sir Robert Cotton makes a perfect example, possessing a rare book collection which surpassed that of the crown. His collection included the original bound manuscript of Beowulf and a fifth-century copy of the Greek Bible, among other treasures. As a secular private library, Cotton’s collection was safe from the shifting political tides of religious allegiance, allowing its contents to survive even today.

Perhaps the most infamous book burners in history, the Nazis waged a ceaseless war against any text which did not reflect their particular worldview. No library, institutional or private, was outside their reach, and the materials held at the Yiddish Scientific Institute was a particular target. Conscripted Jewish workers, nicknamed the Paper Brigade, began smuggling away books and other items from the Institute, secreting them away throughout the ghetto or passing them along to trustworthy outsiders. Two of the Brigade’s leaders, Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, managed to eventually escape imprisonment, but the majority of the members were murdered. However, the group succeeded in saving between 30 and 40 percent of the irreplaceable Institute collection, what is now the largest collection of material about Jewish life in Eastern Europe in existence. Against the overwhelming political and martial force of the Nazis, the humble potato sack became a safer place for valuable books than even a respected research institute.

These anecdotes all demonstrate the clear value of the individual in preserving knowledge. Books have been burned by invading armies and established social institutions alike, but there are always those who can see past the short-term manipulation tactics and into the future. Whether you are a king, prisoner, or anything in between, your efforts could save a work of art or scholarship from destruction. Keep the works you value close. While systemic values may change, the preservation of knowledge by the individual ultimately benefits all. 

 For more on the topic, check out Richard Ovenden's Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

scary stories to ban in the dark

Halloween is poking its little head around the corner -- for me, a deeply nostalgic holiday. Children are often drawn to the macabre and the weird, because that’s their existence: growing pains, lost teeth, with new dangers learned about and confronted and not yet made peace with. Halloween is the season to celebrate their most creepy selves, but the horror section of school libraries is always open, with books that let kids face fears head-on. I’m sure others can relate to younger me begging the school librarian for directions to the scary stuff. It was a sparse section then, in the early 2000s, with its crowning jewel being Alvin Schwartz’ three-part series “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

Y’all remember those books: bite-size tales of ghosts and ghouls, death and mayhem, accompanied by Stephen Gammell’s iconically horrifying illustrations in dripping black and white. They’ve been the stuff of nightmares for several generations. But October’s a good time to reminisce on “Scary Stories” not only because of Halloween; the first through seventh of the month also marks Banned Books Week. According to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, Scary Stories was, between 1990-1999, the most challenged book in America. In the 00s, it moved down to number 7.

An example illustration

Parent groups, individual parents, and even a legislative action committee raised concerns, claiming that some of the disturbing or violent content was not appropriate for children. In a 1993 interview with Chicago Tribune, Sandy Vanderburg, a mother former teacher, brought up perhaps a common complaint about the stories: "There's no moral to them. The bad guys always win. And they make light of death. There's a story called `Just Delicious' about a woman who goes to a mortuary, steals another woman's liver, and feeds it to her husband. That's sick." In the same article, the author was compared to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Schwartz was unphased by the controversy. In an interview with Inverse, Cody Meirick (creator of Scary Stories: A Documentary) said, “Alvin Schwartz really loved the fact that his books were being banned. The attention to censorship within schools and libraries was just beginning to take shape around the time of his passing in the early 1990s. The American Library Association really started tracking and making lists in the mid-1980s, which was when his books began to really take off. But Alvin loved it and thought it was great publicity.” There is something particularly appealing about the controversial stuff when you’re younger, isn’t there? The books continue to garner fans, and even received a film adaptation in 2019.

The first volume of “Scary Stories” was also republished on its 30th anniversary with less-nightmarish illustrations, now done by illustrator Brett Helquist, a former missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who is best known for his drawings in the 13 “Series of Unfortunate Events” books. Though gorgeous in their own right, these new “Scary Stories" illustrations just didn’t do it for fans of Gammell’s OG drawings. In 2017, the books were republished with the original artwork. 

Newer cover by Helquist

 

An example of Helquist's illustration

Flipping back through “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” as a grown adult, I was impressed by its packed bibliography, several spanning pages in a book that doesn’t have that many pages to begin with. Schwartz was a passionate folklorist, and put great research into his work. In an interview with Language Arts Magazine, he said of his process: “Basically, what I do with every book, is learn everything I can about the genre. This will involve a lot of reading and scholarly books and journals and sometimes discussions and scholarly folklorists... In the process of accumulating everything on a subject, I begin setting aside things that I particularly like. What's interesting is that eventually patterns emerge.” Wherever you stand on the question of how much violence or horror young readers should be exposed to, you can’t deny that a monstrous amount of work went into these books, and that even today, they remain a key title in the world of creepy fiction, as well as a contested title for concerned parents.

The Literary Origins of Robots

 

School’s back in session. Time to learn something new. Do you know where the word “robot” comes from? 

   Meet Karel Čapek. He loves dogs. He loves gardening. He is a Capricorn with impeccable bone structure and an asteroid named after him. If he sounds like your perfect man, he is unfortunately both married and dead. Luckily, you still can encounter this Czech writer through the myriad works he left behind. 

   A true Bohemian, he was born in Bohemia, 1890. A true intellectual even at a young age, he performed well in school. A true rebel, he was kicked out of said school, due to membership in a secret anarchist society. His political views, both anti-fascist and anti-communist, later informed much of his work. 

 

Karel Čapek

 

  

One particularly important production is his 1920 play R. U. R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the story of a factory that produces human-like machines, destined for hard labor and indistinguishable from real people; they eventually lead a revolt against their creators. The word “robot” describes these humanoid machines, and derives from the word “robota,” Czech for “work.” Though his brother, the painter Josef Čapek actually invented the word, Karel’s usage introduced it to the wider public. 

   A true lover of theater, Čapek wrote several other plays, including The Insect Play, a bug-filled satire of post WWI Czechoslovakia, or perhaps a harbinger of the 1998 cinematic masterpiece “A Bug’s Life.” Čapek even married an actress, Olga Scheinpflugová. She, like any good playwright’s wife, later died on-stage performing one of his plays, Mother. She was a writer too, prolific with sixteen novels, seven books of poetry, ten plays, and more.

   No fear if plays aren’t your thing, though. Čapek was also a novelist. Consider his 1936 sci-fi work War With Newts. It's a scathing indictment of contemporary European politics, shrouded in  a story of humans’ war with a race of intelligent newts. 

    If fiction doesn’t do it for you, Capek wrote plenty of nonfiction too. The Gardener’s Year chronicles his year spent in the garden, recording meditations on flowers, battles with unruly garden hoses, and tips for seed-planting. Dashenka or The Life of a Puppy follows the exploits of his fox terrier Dashenka in her first year of life. Goodreads’ description for it reads: “A naughty puppy's log book, followed by the fairy tales Capek told his puppy while trying to get her to sit still for photos, followed by the endearing photos.” 

 

Dashenka 

 

   

Though nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times, Čapek never won it. Nevertheless, his legacy endures as one of the most important Czech writers, a key figure in establishing a Czech PEN Club, a contributor to epistemology and politics, and, of course, promoter of the word “robot.” 

 

You can purchase some of his works from Eagle Eye Book Shop! Just follow the links below.

 

R.U.R.: https://eagleeyebooks.com/book/9780141182087 

The Gardener's Year:  https://eagleeyebooks.com/book/9781529096248  

The War with the Newts: https://eagleeyebooks.com/book/9781612190235

 

 

 

 

   

Give Thanks to Zucchini on August 8th!

When researching upcoming holidays, national days and other summer celebrations in search of inspiration, I came across the little known and eye-catchingly strange “National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day,” taking place on August 8th. Invented by eccentric actor Thomas Roy, the day purportedly exists due to the zucchini plant’s tendency to produce, produce, produce far more fruits than can be consumed by a typical home grower. Sneaking a basket of stripey green squash onto your neighbor’s porch helps take care of your excess produce, promoting communal food sharing and seasonal cooking along the way!

In this spirit of season-appropriate cooking, I would like to share my favorite zucchini-centric recipe: Zucchini Taglierini! For other recipes featuring zucchini (or courgette in French), check out The Year of Miracles, shortlisted for the 2023 Andre Simon Best Cookbook Award!

 

Zucchini Taglierini

Ingredients

Pasta of choice (the original recipe calls for handmade taglierini, I usually use penne rigate)

8 oz small green or golden zucchini

1 lemon

6 tablespoons virgin olive oil

5 tablespoons pine nuts (chopped walnuts are a decent substitute)

2 large shallots, thinly sliced

4 teaspoons capers, rinsed

2-3 sun-dried tomatoes, cut into strips

Salt and pepper

1. Bring a pot of water to boil.

2. Slice the zucchini diagonally into ⅛-¼ inch thick slices. Line up the slices and cut them into narrow matchsticks. Each one will be tipped with green or gold.

3. Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a small pan and add the nuts. Cook them until they begin to color, then add the shallots. Cook the two together on medium-low heat until the shallots are soft and the pine nuts are browned. Transfer them to a wide bowl and add the rest of the oil, capers, and sun-dried tomatoes. Season with salt, freshly ground black pepper, and about ½ teaspoon of lemon juice (to taste).

4. Add salt to the boiling water, drop in the zucchini matchsticks, and cook for 1 minute. Scoop out the zucchini, shake off the water, and add it to the bowl with the other ingredients.

5. Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook to preference. Add the cooked pasta to the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Toss the pasta and other ingredients together and serve.

snowy selections to keep heat at bay

 

The shoe-melting hot concrete and blistering air of Georgia summer have me dreaming of snow. If you too like arctic escapes in your literature, these are the titles for you. 

 

"The Writing Retreat" by Julia Bartz

A bone-chilling writer's nightmare, set in snow-capped rural New York. A young novelist is accepted to a horror writers’ retreat, hosted by her favorite author in a remote gothic castle where demonic possession potentially once took place. But when things seem too good to be true, they usually are. Our heroine’s ex-best-friend, now a sworn enemy, is in attendance. The stakes rise as the writers learn they have a month to write an entirely new novel, with the winner getting a cushy publication deal. The competition is cutthroat. At first, metaphorically. Later, literally. The surrounding snow blocks easy escape when things get bloody.  Click To Buy Here

 

 "Migrations" by Charlotte McConaghy

 If you’re ever feeling too happy, no worries; this book will fix that. Its draw is the double-whammy of heartbreak and climate change. The protagonist runs from past failures in love and towards the arctic to study the last-ever migration of terns. She hates fishermen, but hitches a ride on a fishing boat. Tensions are taut on this boat as icebergs and oceanic snowstorms carve away what little sanity the crew clings on to. Mutiny brews. The plot veers towards the melodramatic, but that makes sense: our heroine is hapless, and her beloved birds are dying (as is most life on Earth). Get ready to feel snow in your hair and the salty sting of the ocean (or maybe your tears) with this one.  Click To Buy Here

 

"The True Deceiver" by Tove Jansson

Our chilly main character is Katri Kling, incredibly intelligent and ferociously antisocial. She lives in a snowy Scandinavian village, caring for no one but her brother and dog. Further away lives Anna Aemelin, a reclusive children’s book illustrator in a gorgeous house coveted by Katri. Braving snowstorms on foot, Katri treks with weekly supplies to Anna’s house, taking over the old courier’s route as she tries to worm into Anna’s life and take over the house. The author, Tove Jansson, is most famous for her children’s books about the Moomins, so the psychological twistiness of this one is deliciously different from the usual. It’s still somehow cozy: the glow of lamps on snow, a hearth warming to keep cold at bay. Click To Buy Here

 

“Moon of the Crusted Snow” by Waubgeshig Rice

An Anishinaabe First Nations community prepares for the winter ahead. A sudden blackout severs telephones, electricity, all connections to the wider world. Community leaders try to curb the peoples’ panic as supplies dwindle. Interlopers from the South bring news of the apocalypse striking cities beyond the reservation. Snow is a deadly obstacle in this novel, stalling trucks and killing youngsters, sliding under even the heaviest coats of the fearful and starving. But, the warmth of community keeps the worst frost at bay.  Click To Buy Here

 

Summertime Sadness

Beach reads and poolside paperbacks are back in season. Though these summertime sizzlers are delightful, those who prefer to sulk indoors deserve their own curated summer reading list. Here are the titles best fit for a little summertime sadness. 

A woman granted magic powers turns her abusive husband into a dinosaur. Another woman is impregnated by an alien. Young girls hatch a murder plot. A rock n’ roll fan is stranded between alternate timelines. "Hit Parade of Tears" is a short story collection that shifts through bizarre and lonely landscapes, following some of the saddest, most violent characters you’ll ever encounter. Great for armchair-traveling to different dimensions. Click to Buy


 

Poets are the best at writing prose. For proof, read "The Copenhagen Trilogy." Composed of three autobiographical works, it traces the life of Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen from girlhood to adolescence to a series of marriages. Her words are clear, sad, true. She’s a lonely kid with a harsh family, then a woman coming of age under the shadow of WWII, then a wife with ill-fitting husbands. A section featuring her third husband, a manipulative doctor, scared me more than most horror books. Reading this is like reminiscing with your most clear-eyed, intelligent, and sensitive friend, perhaps on a summer evening after the solstice has passed and daylight is only bound to get shorter. Click to Buy




 

In "The Invention of Morel," a man on the lam is stranded on an overgrown island. He struggles for sanity, his routines controlled by ocean tides. Sad enough? Then a woman appears daily near his resting place, reading and ignoring our hapless protagonist as he falls in love from afar. Turns out, there’s a whole merry band of partiers on the island. They have a grand old time picnicking, conversing in French, and generally hanging out, all without him. The island is a bizarre choice for tourism, given old rumors of residents succumbing to radiation sickness. Our protagonist eventually learns the bitter truth behind these people’s presence. All I can say, you might reconsider your relationship to media and all those Tik-Toks summer leaves you free to consume after you read this 1940 novel. Click to Buy


 

Recommending classics feels redundant, but "Frankenstein" is (literally) ever-green. Christopher Nolan is a smart little guy for coming up with “Inception” but unfortunately Mary Shelley beat him to the plot-within-a-plot-within-a-plot structure by a few years. The loneliness the creature feels is unparalleled by anyone, except perhaps those of us facing a free summer day with no plans. With the open time vacation creates, why not contemplate the horrors of existence, grapple with the hypocrisy of exclusion, and debate the morality of violence with the world's first sci-fi novel? Click to Buy



 

She’s an artist who’s made no art in years, a forger who got caught, and a disappointment to her family. He’s a detested professor, a genius mathematician, and a bee fanatic. In "Alone With You in the Ether," their jagged paths collide in the Art Institute of Chicago. Though they are both pathologically antisocial, they agree to six conversations to figure each other out. This launches a doomed love affair that will help you feel better about your own failed summer fling. Click to Buy

The Queer Horror of Negative Space

A few weeks ago, I read the horror novel Negative Space by B. R. Yeager. I loved it in all its oppressive, disturbing, befuddling glory, and while it is certainly not for everyone, it made me take a fresh look at the way queer fiction is conceptualized. Make no mistake, Negative Space IS a queer novel, despite the lack of narrative tags or tropes that might make it obvious. No character ever utters the words gay, lesbian, or other markers of a fixed identity; there is no coming-out plotline, no persecution by ignorant townsfolk; in the uncontrollable chaos of their lives, the teenage characters flow from partner to partner, identity to identity, denying to the reader the stability and sense of understanding provided by labels. The queerness of Negative Space is a queerness of excess, of overflowing beyond identity itself.


Negative Space takes place in a fictional city struggling with unemployment, ennui, and teenage deaths. It follows three(?) teenage protagonists linked only by their age and their connection to Tyler, a charismatic and unstable force of both tricksterish malice and bottomless sadness. This traditional setup falls off more and more steeply as the novel progresses, revealing a hidden reality governed by unfamiliar and terrifying principles. It is through this ontological instability that the novel’s queerness becomes apparent.


In a piece written for the website Literary Hub, author Brandon Taylor writes that “Shame, pain, and an intense desire to assimilate are the most legible aspects of queer life as perceived by the heteronormative overculture.” Notably, the same characteristics of shame, pain and desire to assimilate resonate equally well with another demographic: teenagers. The novel takes this resonance and uses it to queer teenage adolescence itself, a state in which identity is in constant flux. The characters have as little desire to make it through their teenage years to the promised stability of adulthood as they do in defining their gender or sexual preferences, and while they certainly experience shame and pain, any desire to assimilate is stymied by a world that, in true horror fashion, is revealed as fundamentally hostile to their existence. The town’s epidemic of teenage deaths reveals life itself to be an unstable state, one further destabilized by the unexplained return of one of the dead later on in the novel. The pervasive queer rejection of fixed identity seems almost to dissolve the veil between life and death.


The character of Lu is perhaps the most strikingly destabilized identity of the novel, offering the reader very little in the way of fixed markers. Pronouns vary depending on the speaker, name spelling switches abruptly between Lu and Lou, and their internal monologue is peppered with synesthesia. Guesses could be made about what terms might fit Lu, but the novel never makes any attempt to tell the reader anything for certain. As before, Negative Space has no interest in reaching a settled state. Just as the teenage protagonists never seem to reach the stability promised by adulthood, Lu’s identity spirals outwards, becoming ever more unconstrained as the story plays out.


Negative Space is difficult to talk about. It resists description, just like its characters.

You can experience Negative Space for yourself by purchasing the book through our website.