This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destruction from a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destruction from a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

List of Illustrations Notes on the contributors Introduction; Adam Smyth and Gill Partington PART I: BURNING 1. Burning Sex Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin; Heike Bauer 2. Burning to Read: Ben Jonson's Library Fire of 1623; Adam Smyth PART II: MUTILATING 3. From Books to Skoob; Or, Media Theory with a Circular Saw; Gill Partington 4. The Complete Works of Franz Kafka Burned [interview]; Ross Birrell PART III: DOCTORING 5. Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates, and Graffiti: Dorothy Helbarton's Book; Anthony Bale 6. Doctoring Victorian Literature: A Humument [interview]; Tom Phillips PART IV: DEGRADING 7. 'Miss Cathy's riven th' back off 'Th' Helmet uh Salvation'': Representing Book Destruction in Mid-Victorian Print Culture; Stephen Colclough 8. Waste Matters: Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling; Heather Tilley PART V: DEFORMING/RESHAPING 9. Aesthetics of Book Destruction; Kate Flint 10.Kindle : Recyling and the future of the book [interview]; Nicola Dale Bibliography Index