From Book Burning to Canon
On the Destruction & Preservation of Sacred & Profane Texts
by Patrick Henry Reardon
I have been known to take advantage of the special sales that local libraries run now and then with a view to making their limited shelf space available to newer titles, and once in a while I thereby discover some work or other that I am happy to add to my own little collection. Glancing up over my desk right now I espy, for example, more than a score of the Loeb Classics acquired in this way, and just behind me is an original French work of Henri Bergson similarly obtained.
Such windfalls do not come very often, however, and I presume that the books left unsold at the end of such special sales will, in due course, find their way to the neare . . .
