A Commonplace Book

These stories were of the wholesale abandonment or destruction of rare and valuable books by public institutions, even of those books willed by individuals to those public institutions. It was not as if librarians were merely ambivalent or negligent of the books in their charge, but as if they actually hated them, as workers in chocolate factories come to hate chocolate. One bookseller in Wales told me that he found seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books dumped in a skip outside a supposed institution of learning. Another found the librarians of a county library walking over the sixteenth-century books that they had pulled from the shelves preparatory to throwing them away in order to make space for more computer terminals. The process is called deacquisitioning, a truly Orwellian term, as if demolition or bombing were called debuilding; and one of the justifications for the process is that records show that the deacquisitioned items have not been consulted for years, for decades. A library is no longer a repository of all that has been thought or written but a department store where the readers determine by their borrowing habits what stock should be held. If they want Dan Brown rather than the Summa Theologica, then that is what libraries should carry. The customer is king.