Where to Take Our Books?

A few weeks ago, Professor Sabine Wienker-Piepho, the Vice President of the Freiburg Museumsgesellschaft, gave an enchanting keynote speech on book ownership today. 

The term "bibliocide" was only partly appropriate, but it was apparent how concerned she was about the future of printed books. Here are some of her slides.

The Encyclopdia Britannica is no longer available in print but on the Internet. Unlike the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, you have to subscribe. Some people only trust the EB and are suspicious of Wikipedia.

As an IM (informal contributor) to the German version of Wikipedia, I would like to emphasize the ongoing topicality of its information and its completeness through swarm knowledge. At the same time, I stress that some of my Wikipedia colleagues are in a frenzy about making corrections. On the other hand, the style and grammar of WP articles often need improvement.

That there is a 14-volume Fairy Tale Encyclopedia was new to me.

This is not a work of art, but are unsold copies of the "best-selling" The Fifth Shade of Gray arranged in some fancy way in a bookshop in the UK. Books may seem to be selling less and less, but in the States, every guest on Stephen Colbert's Late Show, whether actor, sportsman, or politician, presents his/her newest book.

"Intellectual" Boris in front of a half-empty bookshelf in 10 Downing Street? On the top left is the book Sabine described as the dystopia of book ownership: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury from 1955. Red Baron still remembers the movie in which government agents hunt down books with flamethrowers.

The Church and governments have always tried to eliminate unpleasant views by burning books. Luther's writings were burned; in 1817, students consigned reactionary books to the fire at Wartburg Castle, and the book burning by the Nazis in 1933 was the high point so far.

There were attempts to burn books not only in Berlin but also in Freiburg.

The Documentation Center in Munich displays some of the books' titles consigned to the fire during the 3rd Reich in its vestibule.

Red Baron loves books, but he also suffers from the accumulated crowd.

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Here is the main shelf in my study, which contains physics books, history books, books on languages, and literature.

In my study, there is also a cupboard with special editions such as the works and the complete scientific edition of Christoph Lichtenberg, my Hans Küng collection, Karlheinz Deschner's complete Criminal History of Christianity, Annegarn's World History of 1899, Gottfried Keller's works, Theodor Fontane's works, Jean Paul's works, a three-volume Meyers Lexicon from 1931 to 1934 with an addendum on the Nazi seizure of power in volume 3, and art volumes.

My bedroom has a shelf with a lot of literature about Freiburg and DVDs ...

... and a second one with travel literature and comics. Since starting my job at CERN, I've collected a complete French edition of all the Asterix comics and many secondary literature on the subject.  Queezed in a corner is a charger with multiple outlets for my various iDevices.

In the living room, I keep the German classics that Elisabeth once inherited from her aunt Kathi. Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lessing Kleist, and even Shakespeare were once a must in every German bourgeois household. A French literary history and many unique individual books are on the lower shelves.

Where do I take my books?

When I moved from Geneva to Freiburg in 2001, I offered most of my math and physics books to the university library. I had kept them in Geneva for 32 years, as German textbooks are not in demand in a French-speaking environment. The university library showed interest and asked me to bring the books over. That was too much because they were in two small boxes. Eventually, they sent a van.

Four years ago, I offered my Freiburg books to the city archive posthumous. Yes, they already had an extensive collection and would like well-preserved individual copies. I assume that interest has since died out completely.

Sabine's last slide is giving me a headache: Do books have their fates?

In the Middle Ages, every handwritten book was a treasure, and even after the invention of printing, books were initially expensive. During the Thirty Years' War, entire libraries were plundered and taken away, from Heidelberg to Rome, from Prague to Upsala.

Today, many publications are not worth the paper they were printed on.

In the discussion, many people anecdotally talked about their own experiences with too many books but had no solutions for their own floods.

Red Baron also has no solution for where to take his many books. He has started reading e-books and sees the advantages, not only in saving paper, but that's another story.

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