Autodafé hivernal

6 novembre 2008

For all who love books, art, learning, and yearn for a president once again, who is curious about the world, and embodies the belief in a good education. Here is Sarah the lovely librarian and thumbs-up McCain against a backdrop of burning books.*

It's only a paper Moon © Fleeting Matters

Lisez ce qui suit. Je ne suis pas encore prêt à passer à l'acte et vous???

A librarian’s modest proposal / Nathan Deprey**
In : Osceola Sun

Even with the recent drop in oil prices this will likely be the most costly winter heating seasons in human history. Homeowners, business owners and government officials are all looking for ways to cut costs and make their homes and other buildings more efficient. As a public library director looking to do his share, I’d like to offer this modest proposal: burn books.

Now just hear me out.

Nobody likes to throw a book away, not a bad book, not even a terrible book. There is something inside most of us that will not let us drop a Harlequin Romance in the recycling bin. We see an inherent value in a book, any book, that may or may not be there.

The result of this is that boxes, bags and pallets of books are donated to libraries every day. Even with two book sales a year the Osceola Public Library is left with hundreds of out-of-date text books, old repair manuals, lousy movie novelizations and abominably bad condensed Reader’s Digest editions that we have to throw out at the end of each book sale. Add to it the countless old magazines, newspapers, printed receipts, routing slips and our own damaged and unpopular books the library is forced to discard every day and a public library can quickly find itself among its community’s “leaders” in the production of post consumer paper waste.

The way I look at it, we can do one of two things. We can either continue to fill our recycling bin with broken-spined paper backs and way back issues of People Magazine, much of which will be shipped to China to be reprocessed and shipped back to the United States as the packaging for that nation’s cheap manufactured goods. Or we could try something different.

By switching the library’s heating from natural gas to romance novels the more than two thousand dollars the Osceola Public Library spends on heating each year could be diverted to pay for new books and added adult and children’s programming. Additionally, I can think of no greater source of renewable energy than the creative output of Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, James Patterson and other equally prolific authors.

I understand that there may be some well-meaning resistance to this and I doubt we should ever advertise this heating plan. That said,

“The Osceola Public Library, proudly burning books since 2008”

has a bit of a ring to it.

L'hiver approche, voici donc une solution proposée par un bibliothécaire fou (mais ne le sommes nous pas tous un peu?) : brûler - à la place de les envoyer au recyclage - les dons que sa bibliothèque n'arrive pas à vendre.

On avait déjà abordé la question de la chaleur du don ici il y a quelques semaines déjà. Dans Le Jour d'après dont la scène qui nous intéresse se déroule dans la bibliothèque publique de New-York, les captifs du glacier ont décidé de brûler les livres qui les entouraient pour se chauffer. Ils auraient pu brûler des chaises, des tables mais non, il fallait qu'ils s'en prennent aux livres. Le débat qui s'en suivit était facile mais a le mérite d'exister dans un film d'action de ce type.

Nous ne sommes pas dans une période glaciaire à proprement parler mais il est vrai que cette année risque d'être la plus chère en matière de coût de chauffage qu'il m'ait été donné de connaître jusqu'ici.

Comme l'auteur de l'article, je crois que jamais nous n'aurons l'occasion de lire ce qui suit.

Tex_242 brûle fièrement des livres depuis 2008

Au fait, ça brûle les eBooks???

Le portable brûlé du jour © Blogeek