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A few years ago, a vandal seized some 40 or 50,000 books from my college's library.

He didn't want to read them, or even to sell them. He wanted simply to get rid of them

on the grounds that nobody would read them anyway. Some of the volumes he had branded for destruction

were irreplaceable. I know, because I went into the back room where they were being held

temporarily before the trucks came to haul them away. From that room, I saved several dozen,

including a definitive dictionary of medieval Latin, and the first great grammar book for

Anglo-Saxon. You know, the language that Beowulf spoke on the night when he was tearing

Grendel's arm off, and the monster knew that his end was near. That was not a good day for Grendel,

says the poet, Deadpan. It was not a good day for the books, either. There wasn't much we could do

about it, because the vandal in question made more money than we did, and had a nicer office.

He was our librarian. It's ironic, but true that one of the qualifications of the modern

librarian is a distaste for books. They take up space. Space, the librarian's complaint, is

limited. The books grow old, too. Their covers fray. The spines crack. The pages go dog-eared.

Inattentive student workers stick them on the wrong shelves where they can practically

disappear for years. People borrow them and don't return them. Some people, I'm guilty of this,

underlying favorite passages or right, right comments in the margins, so that the book eventually

becomes a kind of successive crime scene. Here a priest wrote, this is modernist heresy all over

again, but over there an infidel wrote, Church, enemy of thought. That is not to mention

fingerprints and inkblots and even blood stains from crushed mosquitoes, I guess.

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