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Book-burning in Kansas City
Mo. Man Burns Books as Act of Protest
By DAVID TWIDDYKANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Tom Wayne 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 like 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 wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest 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.
The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them.
Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply - estimated at 20,000 books - is exhausted.
"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.
Kansas City has seen the number of used bookstores decline in recent years and there are few independent bookstores left in town, said Will Leathem, a co-owner of Prospero's Books.
"There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books," Leathem said. ...
In the dim recesses of the mid-1990s, I owned an old-book shop in Baltimore known as Book Miser. To describe the experience in eight words, it was an elegant way to go broke. Like Wayne and Leathem (whom I've dealt with, back when booksellers used to find books for their regular customers from other book shops), I have had the same frustration.
When we finally put Book Miser out of its misery, there were between 10,000 and 20,000 books on hand, not to mention all the interesting pamphlets and the sheet music.
Selling books on eBay, Amazon, and Half.com is not worth the trouble, and the "professional" bookselling sites such as Alibris and ILAB-LILA have user agreements that require a lawyer to interpret. Besides, there is something vaguely unsatisfying about selling books to customers you will never meet, and (in the case of Alibris) you are not allowed to have contact with.
The one book auctioneer in town once told me that I would never, in my life, own a book worthy of being sold in his auction. Three general auction houses took consignments rather sneeringly, even though I had bought God knows how many books from them. A fourth auctioneer sold some of my stuff, but refused to pay me.
Johns Hopkins University now runs the Peabody Conservatory of Music. I gave them a dozen boxes of wonderfully-bound opera scores, most in pristine condition, and did not get so much as a thank-you note for my trouble.
A truckload of books was donated to the Smith College sale. The following year I learned they had not even begun sorting them.
I had given up donating to the Brandeis Club sale, because of their uppity attitude: You'd pull up with a truckload of boxed books, and the ladies would insist on sorting through every box on the spot, and making you take away what they did not want. (Now, most of us in the book business were honorable enough not to use the book sales as a substitute for a trash bin, and I refused to bear this insult twice. )
The League of Women Voters of Howard County conducts a sale, but they treat booksellers so shabbily that I quit going some years earlier, much less donating to them. (Buy me a beer some time and I will tell you about being threatened by an LWV member waving her cane at me...)
The Goodwill book store, long a fixture in Mount Vernon, is gone, and Goodwill Industries now welcomes book donations with the same attitude they would welcome used diapers. At the Salvation Army, you can leave the books but they would rather you didn't.
That leaves only two alternatives for disposing of quantities of books. The more socially acceptable of the two is an enterprise calling itself "The Book Thing." The owner of this place finally hit upon the one way to support yourself in the old-book business in Baltimore: give away the books, and find grant money to pay yourself. This is fine, but I am loathe to put books, free, into the hands of some of the same people who wandered in to 906 Fell Street, bent my ear about all their personal problems, likes and dislikes, the weather, the phase of the moon, and whatnot, then left without spending a thin dime, even after they had enthusiastically chirped "Oh, how I love old books," or some such when they walked in the door.
Having had a lifetime's worth of run-ins with the Baltimore County government, I am not about to do any open burning. So I will continue slowly, sadly and shamefully taking books to the recycling bin when I am hauling away the genuine rubbish.