There’s pain in junked books — but here’s an explanation for it
Recently, a picture of a dumpster full of books being discarded by Kelvyn Park High School circulated on social media, generating outrage among some members of the public who couldn’t fathom destroying classics such as “Crime and Punishment” and “Brave New World.”
Seeing the pictures gave me a flashback to my childhood, when I learned that sometimes unwanted books are left in dumpsters, or destroyed in other ways, and that this is often impossible to avoid.
Back in the day, when Mother Biblioracle owned The Book Bin in Northbrook, my first paying job was to rip the covers off of mass market paperbacks that had gone unsold, one cent per cover. The bodies of the books wound up in the dumpster behind the store.
Some of you may be gasping in horror, but this practice is a consequence of the unusual nature of the book business rooted in a Depression-era initiative that kept books available when stores could otherwise not afford to buy stock.
The books in a store are, in reality, on consignment and can be returned to the bookseller for a refund at any time. Stores run accounts with publishers, balancing purchases and returns as they go.
Mass market paperbacks that have not sold in a particular store are not worth the expense of shipping back to the publisher, where they are most likely going to be destroyed upon arrival.
The covers are ripped off and sent back to the publisher to prove the book has not been secretly sold and so the store can receive the credit on return. You may have noticed a warning in mass market paperbacks saying that if a copy of a book doesn’t have a cover that it has been reported as destroyed. This means that it’s a book for which no one has been paid.
Mother Biblioracle tells me that it always pained her to destroy the mass market paperbacks, which is maybe why she paid her grade schooler to do it. But in truth, the whole purpose of mass market paperbacks was to make books accessible by creating a format that was, ultimately, disposable. I have many mass market paperbacks on my shelves, some better than 35 years old, and if I actually pick one up and start flipping through it, it’s not long before pages start to separate from the spine.
The paper is cheap, friable, the glue impermanent. While we may revere the words and ideas in a book, the object itself is not necessarily made to endure.
Conservatively speaking, I’ve likely had at least 50,000 copies of my own books pulped when they failed to sell and went out of print. Authors get a final chance purchase as many copies as they want before copies are destroyed in some fashion whose details I’ve purposefully never learned, but in my mind resembles a giant woodchipper, shredding books into bitesized bits.
Some well-meaning folks reportedly rescued some of the books from the Kelvyn Park dumpster, and hopefully those books find a home, but I’ll be honest: I’m skeptical. In order to make sure there’s enough books for people to access what they desire or need we have to print many more books than will ever be consumed. Excess is inevitable.
Converting to all-digital distribution is the obvious solution to this problem, except that the visceral pull people feel for those discarded books is a reminder why the printed book will never disappear.
It’s wonderful that books rouse so much passion, but we also shouldn’t confuse an object with the ideas and stories and experiences that truly animate the work.