book burning

Had my atavistic fill today when I went through and got rid of the
out-of-date textbooks in our medical library. The library is kept on
several white wooden shelves in the doctor's office; it's a mixture of
books from various eras (leprosy surgery from 1930, HIV brochures from
last month), spiderwebs, and old mud burrows from the wasps and
termites. So I went through and swept away the old dirt and culled out
some of the outdated and redundant books that we had around. I'm told
that the last time they were sorted through they used them as ballast at
the end of a lightning rod grounding -- today I had more fun as we took
them out to the dump pit and burned them. It's surprisingly difficult
to burn books, especially without kerosene to douse them with. I think
given how many times I've heard about book-burnings that it would be easier.
The procession out to the dump was entertaining: although it's just a
few hundred yards, we arrived with only about half of the books that we
set out with after being stopped by various people along the way. The
local policemen really wanted both the copies of the PDR (a
pharmaceutical compendium put out every year -- quite massive) from both
1998 and 2000, so if they want to prescribe some viagra, I think they
will be covered. Also escaping the Fahrenheit 451 were two copies of
the Christian Doctor Quarterly from 1992, which one of the guys from the
workshop (his name is Diamond) wanted to have for reading. One of the
local villagers wanted to leaf through Manson's tropical diseases. When
I was in the village I was struck by how people would take anything to
read if it was available. But apparently I underestimated the
entertainment value of new techniques for gallbladder surgery. I will
make sure to check around a bit more before burning any more books.