Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. - Alberto Manguel

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality.

reading is at the beginning of the social contract