Tome policing

Let us give thanks for the untiring work of university administrators. Every day, these selfless paragons find new ways not only to ensure that their institutions flourish, but that the very lives and welfare of the academics committed to their charge are kept free from every kind of danger.

We learn in a recent news report that one scholar, Dr Christopher Fear, a lecturer in politics at the University of Hull, was saved from the jaws of destruction by the sharp-eyed intervention of one such bureaucrat. This person mounted a “standard workplace safety check” and was deeply worried by the sight of a number of books sitting on Dr Fear’s bookshelf.

We might think that putting books on a bookshelf is a conventional sort of thing to do, something that we got into the habit of doing in the 16th century and not worthy of any further comment. But this bureaucrat was more careful. They came to the problem with admirably fresh vision, as one would hope for in any academic institution, and realised that this custom was deeply perilous.

the keeping of books on bookshelves is now “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials.”

Thus, out of an abundance of care for Dr Fear’s life and limb, the bureaucrat sent an email to him with a dread warning. The books must go, it decreed. There was nothing healthy nor wise in the practice, for the keeping of books on bookshelves is now “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials.”

How relieved Dr Fear must feel to be rescued from the perils of his book collection. How much better he must be able to do his job, now that his study is not unnecessary harbouring combustible materials.

But how much did this kindly bureaucrat underplay the hazards of bibliophilia. I know how dangerous it is to live with books. They are an omnivalent threat. Forget death under a falling bookcase, as at the end of Howard’s End. I wonder how I have reached my fifth decade with a full compliment of limbs, given my repeated exposure to razor-edged page turns. Paper cuts on the fingertip were a small mercy, and a caution.

Every part of my poor frame bears the mark of excessive exposure to these unnecessary combustible materials

Every part of my poor frame bears the mark of excessive exposure to these unnecessary combustible materials. I crooked my back and shoulders by humping around rucksacks of tomes in my youth, fearful of being short of reading material. I once bruised my toe by fumbling a heavy lexicon onto it. I have breathed in goodness knows what clouds of antique dust and fungal spores, perhaps dormant carriers of the plague and smallpox, from 17th century folios. The arsenic from old Verdigris Victorian bindings will have seeped into my palms.

All these dangers arise from the mere use of books. What also of their misuse? Books can take their place alongside knives, candlestick holders and firearms as dealers of murderous violence. I recall that the pupils of Westminster School retain a historic right to kill their head chef with books in certain limited circumstances. On Shrove Tuesday, he is required to toss a grand pancake over a high iron bar in one of the school’s great buildings so that theassembled scholars can fight over it to win a prize (one guinea). If he fails to toss the pancake over the bar three times, the scholars, we are told, may batter him to death with their Greek primers, accompanied by cries of “Pan-kakiste!” (“Very terrible!” in ancient Greek).

And what about books as instruments of self-harm? I still wonder about the fate of a friend of mine at prep school who ate an entire exercise book one lunchtime, staples and all, as part of a bet. I never knew what became of his alimentary tract, since munching pieces of workbook became a compulsive habit with him, but I have do doubt that it would likely be in a better state had a university bureaucrat been on hand in our classroom that morning to scoop the books into the wastepaper basket.

It is curious that having suffered the slings and arrows of book ownership for so long – I say nothing of the deleterious effect on the bank balance caused by buying the things, or the harm caused to one’s sanity by reading them – the only way that I have not been hurt by them is by their combustion.

Yet, this is surely just a matter of time. All those of you reading this who might be perched in our seats of higher education, do not wait to be told. Lecturers, Readers, Doctors, Proctors, Professors, be proactive in making your universities the places that the administrators want them to be. You can make them fully safe spaces, free not only from triggering thoughts that might challenge your students’ world-views, but also unnecessarily combustible materials, by following the Solomon-like instruction of the Hull bureaucrats. Scoop out your bookshelves, your cupboards, and drag whatever tomes you may be hoarding into the centre of your quadrangles, and set fire to them there so that they offer no hazard to your studies.

And then, to complete matters, you should consider sitting on top of the bonfire created. The universities will then be the exclusive preserve of the all-wise bureaucrats, whom you can be sure will not fall into the folly of cluttering up their shelves with anything so unnecessary and dangerous as books.