I wonder what Ray Bradbury would make of it!

Recently, a Kansas City, Mo. bookseller burned some of his books in protest against what he viewed as a diminishing respect for the printed word. In other words, fewer and fewer people are reading.

Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" told of a future where books are burned by "firemen" as part of a totalarian society. He was partly inspired by the book-burnings of the repressive 50's. Now it seems, books can be burned because people hardly read them anymore!

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Yikes! How silly!? Wouldn't that be much like taking a public stand against child abuse by giving a bunch of pre-schoolers a good beating in the town square? Just to show how unthinkable/horrible/sad the situation is or can be?
What a strange way to address a social dilemma! Burning something as means to show your support of it? I don't get it...

If he is in fact burining "stripped" mass markets (and would explain it as such) it makes the demonstration even more "odd". The explanation would then equate books as little more than worthless socks with holes in them. I suspect that isn't the point he planned to make.

As a former bookseller, too, it's funny that "strip lists" should come up today as I was pondering it yesterday (in regards to the "panhandling"/food thread). In that discussion we were addressing "old" sandwiches and that they should NOT be consumed after a certain date, as per that company's policies and procedures. At all. Stripped books carried a similar instruction (albeit a different venue completely). The company policy where I was employed STATED that we were to tear up/dismember/"shred" the books so as to leave them unreadable for "free". Rule breakers that some of us were, though, we didn't do that. We sent them to foreign/domestic hospitals (usually ones that weren't The Mayo Clinic-like in prestige) or senior centers or various shelters that would make themselves known to us as a useful outlet for reading material. At the time it seemed a proper and more reasonable "disposal" of unsaleable material than to just discard it in pieces.

Not that a bookseller mentality applies to all people (and I reckon it should not) but I honestly can't fathom any bookseller that I knew/respected who would cozy to burning a book, in any format or design of it, to make a point. But, that's just my opinion on it. Traditionally, booksellers don't think like the majority of other people .

Edited to correct spelling