The fetish of the paper book – Guido Vitiello

Dear bibliopathologist,
the writer is a professional librarian with almost twenty years of career. I am a freak of order (an obvious characteristic of my profession) but for me this often translates into a violent desire for cleaning, pruning, decluttering. You have no idea, Doctor, how much I like THROWING THE BOOKS AWAY. I’m talking about physical pleasure. Old, obsolete, ruined, unused books… I enjoy a carnal pleasure in taking them off the shelves and eliminating them forever from my collection. I can’t describe the release of endorphins I feel in finding an useless title and saying: let’s discard it. The physical elimination of the book excites me, fills me with euphoria. The fact is that working with books has cured me of a disease of our culture: the sacralization of objects. For this reason, doctor, I am writing to you with a prayer: tell me, is there an element of health in this obsession of mine?

– Frantic Non-Conservative Librarian

Dear Non-Conservative,
for reasons of space I had to cut your long letter in half, but I took care to keep that sentence written in capital letters, THROWING THE BOOKS AWAY. I consider it the key symptom of your condition. Have you ever seen the movie Darkness by Dario Argento? In the first scene we see a black gloved hand holding an open book. The director’s voiceover punctuates a few lines, whose resemblance to your letter – including capital letters – is at least disturbing:

After reading, the mysterious hand throws the book into the flames. And it is an intriguing detail, because the taboo of murder finds its perfect equivalent, for the neurotic reader, in the taboo of throwing books away. In your case, the aggravating circumstance of pyromania is missing, but the almost erotic ecstasy of annihilation is the same as described by Argento.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but because of those revealing capital letters I can’t give you the absolution you were hoping for. It is true what you write, there is an element of health in getting rid of the sacralization of the “paper object”. But you haven’t gotten rid of it at all. If you were to consider books as objects among objects, ordinary profane furnishings, you would not feel that excitement and euphoria, which derive precisely from the profanation of something sacred.

The book for you is still an archaic fetish, the Sacred Parallelepiped, a totem surrounded by taboos. As a highly qualified member of the totem devotee clan, to whom you have dedicated your professional life, you have not even been touched by secularization. In Roger Caillois’ terms, all you have done is convert from the “sacred of respect” to the “sacred of transgression”. But it is always sacred. Or again, by granting us a quick passage to India, you have turned aside from the way of Vishnu the Preserver – to whom every librarian should vow – to put yourself on that of Shiva the Destroyer.

And so, perhaps, you should sign yourself. You are not a Non-Conservative. You are a Destroyer.