History of Book Burning

“We have technology to preserve so much knowledge, we just have to be careful. If you don’t keep morphing it to an updated form of technology, it doesn’t matter if you made copies if you can’t access them.”

“And some people in authoritarian regimes, in a way they want to turn back the effects of the printing press.”

According to Knuth, the motives behind book burning changed after the printing press helped bring about the Enlightenment era — though burning through the collateral damage of war continued to arise (just consider the destruction of the U.S.

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them as to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are,” wrote John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, in his 1644 book Areopagitica.

According to Knuth, the motives behind book burning changed after the printing press helped bring about the Enlightenment era — though burning through the collateral damage of war continued to arise (just consider the destruction of the U.S.

“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself — ” an idea that continues to be espoused in modern culture, like in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Scholar Hans J. Hillerbrand writes that the executioner charged with killing heretics like Bruno and Hus was often the same person who put flame to their books.

Perhaps the most infamous book burnings were those staged by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who regularly employed language framing themselves as the victims of Jews.

Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (more widely remembered for his terracotta army in Xian) ordered a bonfire of books as a way of consolidating power in his new empire.

In Livy’s History of Rome, finished in the 1st century A.D., he describes past rulers who ordered books containing the predictions of oracles and details about celebrations like the Bacchanalia be outlawed and burned to prevent disorder and the spread of foreign customs; philosophers Giordano Bruno and Jan Hus both took positions counter to the Catholic church, the former for his work on Copernican cosmology, the latter for attacking church practices like indulgences.