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Mo. Man Burns Books As Act Of Protest

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero’s Books.

His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October” and Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” to obscure titles, like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn’t even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word….

Every so often we come across a story like this one that manages to be simultaneously heartbreaking, encouraging, wince-worthy, and tempting. We know what it’s like to have books no one wants. And we’re doing our best to be the place that exists to solve problems like this. If we lived in Kansas City, we’d be at Prospero’s Books tomorrow with our rented van and team of volunteers to give all the usable books a good home and turn them into money for literacy programs. As it is the best we can do is blog the story, encourage everyone to think hard about the importance of books and the need to save them from both the literal and metaphoric flames threatening the written word, and hope that the books that hit the burner were the kinds of things featured on our Do Not Want list.

If you have books, take care of them. Read them. Enjoy them. Give them to friends. Pass them along. Hide notes in them. And if you espouse the cause of these particular tomes — or at least those of them that would be good resale candidates — and a little money to spend, well…Prospero’s says they will send them to us for $1/book plus postage, and we would be happy to get any such boxes in the mail.

Edit to add: lively discussion about the issue is happening over at MetaFilter. Very interesting.

So yes, it has been some time since we posted here. My absence is due to the Illinois Family Literacy Conference and other interesting professionalism. But that is totally not the Big News Of The Month.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Web, please welcome:

FINNEGAN R. KEATY

Yay Becca! Yay Nick! Yay Wallace! Yay Finn!

Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

We’re no dummies.

We totally “get” that picking up, loading, hauling, dragging, lugging, hefting and moving boxes of books is not typically viewed as a “fun” activity.

It might actually be compared to a task that my father often references from his youth. “Picking Rock” for example is the task of literally picking rocks out of fields to prepare them for farming. My father insists that if more of today’s youth had to “pick rock” the world would be a better place.

So, maybe hauling books isn’t as bad as picking rock. But it is hard work. We also realize that book pickups have largely been the volunteer opportunities we’ve had available to you, fans of Open Books. This task is not for the weak of heart, or back!

Just last week I met two AWESOME volunteers. We had Mary Pat, so full of energy, a human GPS navigation system who supplied her own vehicle for pickups, and Erin, who not only helped on an empty stomach for hours but was nice enough to write about her experience with us!

Check out her column here:

http://chicagohyperlocal.typepad.com/chicago6corners/2007/05/out_and_about_w.html

I must say that the volunteers that we’ve had join us on book hauling, moving, hefting missions will forever have a very special place in our hearts. Because they truly will understand walking into the store someday that sweat and tears (rarely! but traffic can sometimes provoke them) went into this project and brought all of those books to their shelves.

Gentle and beloved readers all, prepare yourselves for a sublime experience of complete and ineffable beauty.

This gorgeous vehicle, replete in all its 2001 splendor, has been offered to us in donation and will — oh, the wonder of it all — soon be a member of our trusty team. Farewell, hours of sitting in traffic to pick up or return rental trucks in distant suburbs! Adieu, regular bills for unwanted mileage! Goodbye, terror of scheduling a bookmove and showing up with a car only to discover that the generous donor has six times as many boxes as predicted!

Our fabulous van has, in the course of its journey to us and in its current blue-and-white garb, gone some 125k miles. Upon its arrival here in our enclave we will paint it, logo it, scrub it all over, rain praises upon it, gift it with a CD player, and launch it on the road as an ever-cheerful ambassador for Open Books across the city. Readers all, you truly cannot imagine the joy this van will bring us or the almost giddy excitement with which we are anticipating it. Thanks beyond all measure or bounds go out to our spectacular Book Coordinator Marilyn and her outstanding husband Don for making this happen. Now, when asked what my job as Executive Director consists of, it will be more than a pleasure to answer “Driving the van.”

Thought I might connect a blog to a blog this morning.

I came across this last night during my perusal of world news on www.cnn.com.

The headline obviously came screaming at me across the screen…really? Oh no! Who has to ask this question!? What are people saying?!

So read for yourself, feel free to comment here and there. It’s some good reading.

http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/blogs/marquee/index.html