The demise of Oprah’s Book Club might have left publishing bereft, but there was plenty to celebrate in 2011: Amazon Publishing blithely ignored the sniping of the Big Six and installed itself as a player in New York, a billboard of Jeffrey Eugenides in a vest competed with the toothsome blondes gracing Times Square and writers rallied around the cause of Occupied Wall Street. J.K. Rowling announced that Harry Potter would finally be going digital, a plagiarism scandal caused embarrassment and the National Book Foundation will never be lax about its enunciation again. More in the slideshow!
![[Photo: James O. Jenkins]](http://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/pottermore_pressevent1_230611.jpg?w=600)
![Bourdain. [Illustration: Drew Friedman]](http://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/anthony-bourdain002.jpg?w=450)
![Kirshbaum. [Photo: Ben Gabbe]](http://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/6337359158569696471129195_25_lkirshbaumspkennedy_032509-e1325110790375.jpg?w=345)
The next step in their evil plan will be the burning of knowledge Book burning has been done for thousands of years right up until just recently and was caused by some religious sects as “not suitable material”, to governments abolishing certain unsavory books on the subject of sex, government control, etc., and there were some book burnings during the late 1800s to modern times simply to attract attention for the author of that book (what you can’t have you want!)
“Burning of the books and burial of the scholars” in 213 BC is counted as the greatest crime of Qin Shi Huang of China.
The writer Heinrich Heine famously wrote in 1821 “Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings.”
Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice inscribed book-burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved (see illustration). Comstock’s total record in a long and influential career is considered to have effected the destruction of about 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing ‘objectionable’ books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures – all of this material defined as “lewd” by Comstock’s very broad definition of the term (which he and his associates successfully lobbied the United States Congress to inscribe in the Comstock Law),
The Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 is about a fictional future society that has institutionalized book burning. In Orwell’s 1984, the euphemistically-called “memory hole” is used to burn any book or written text which is inconvenient to the regime, and there is mention of “the total destruction of all books published before 1960″.
Some of society book burning is a form of control and feel it is a form of censorship also that religious or political leaders practice against those ideas that they oppose.
Some of the most recent book burnings are: In 1948, at Binghamton, New York children – overseen by priests, teachers, and parents – publicly burned around 2000 comic books. As part of Stalin’s efforts to stamp out Jewish culture in the Soviet Union in the late 1940′s and early 1950′s, the Judaica collection in the library of Birobidzhan, capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast on the Chinese border, was burned. In 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy recited before his subcommittee and the press a a list of supposedly pro-communist authors whose works his aide Roy Cohn found in State Department libraries in Europe. The State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves “material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc. and some were burned. In 1954�55 by order of the Justice Department, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) burned several tons of Wilhelm Reich’s publications that mentioned “orgone energy” In May 1981 Sinhalese police officers on rampage burned the public library of Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka; a huge library collection, which was the second largest library in Asia, was destroyed: 97,000 books and very rare collection of ancient palm leaf volumes were among them. The novel The Satanic Verses has been the subject of bookburnings by Muslims, for instance at Bolton and Bradford in 1989. In the 1990s congregants of the Full Gospel Assembly in Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada burned books with ideas in them that they did not agree with, or that they deemed to contain ideas contrary to the teachings of God. In September 2000, students at the University of California, Berkeley seized copies of Cop Killer: How Mumia-Abu Jamal Conned Millions Into Believing He Was Framed by Dan Flynn during a protest of his speaking engagement promoting the book. In January 2001 the Egyptian Ministry of Culture burned 6,000 books of homoerotic poetry by Abu Nuwas, after pressure from Islamic fundamentalists. There have been several incidents of Harry Potter books being burned, including those directed by churches at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Charleston, South Carolina, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa
The biggest story in the Year in Books is self-publishing which is changing the rules & roles for all participants in this space, including legacy publishers, literary agents, and bookstores, as well as writers. A prime example of this phenomenon is the new novel Ghosts on the Red Line, which I wrote and which readers say they like, that is now being advertised on posters in Boston’s Red Line trains. It’s a different kind of ghost story about what happens when commuters on the Red Line report seeing people whom they know have died.