StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XXXVII

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.
Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.

-- Heinrich Heine, 1821,  his play Almansor

Ancient Greeks and Romans have burned Jewish and Christian scriptures, and any number of popes from the 13th to the 17th centuries ordered the burning of the Talmud, a fate that befell John Wycliffe's works in the 15th century and William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament in the 16th. The Spanish Inquisition burned 5,000 Arabic manuscripts in Granada in 1499 and Spanish conquistadors burned all the sacred texts of the Maya in 1562. Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem burned copies of the New Testament in 1984; Harry Potter books have been burned in the US on various occasions since their first publication.

-- source: Wikipedia

The communists burned untold numbers of decadent western books and writings in the Soviet Union from the 1920s on and several American libraries burned the works of supposedly pro-Communist authors during the McCarthy era.  According to the Madrid Codex, the fourth tlatoani Itzcoatl (ruling from 1427 (or 1428) to 1440) ordered the burning of all historical Aztec codices because it was not wise that all the people should know the paintings; this allowed the Aztec state to develop a state-sanctioned history and mythos that venerated the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. In 1497, followers of the Italian priest Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned pornography, lewd pictures, pagan books, gaming tables, cosmetics, copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, and all the works of Ovid which could be found in Florence.  Following the suppression of the pro-Soviet Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in north Iran in December 1946 and January 1947, members of the victorious Iranian Army burned all Kurdish-language books they could find, closed down the Kurdish printing press and banned the teaching of Kurdish.

-- source: Wikipedia

Books of Arianism were burned after the Council of Nicaea; the Library of Antioch was burned by the Christian Emperor Jovian in 364 after his non-Christian  predecessor, the Emperor Julian, had restock it.  The Sibylline Books were burnt by Flavius Stilicho c. 408.   The Library of Alexandria has been repeatedly destroyed.  The library of the Serapeum in Alexandria was trashed, burned and looted in 392 at the decree of Theophilus of Alexandria who was so ordered by Theodosius I.  Around this same time, Hypatia, the Last Librarian, was murdered. On July 12, 1562, Fray Diego de Landa, acting Bishop of Yucatan - then recently conquered by the Spanish - burned the sacred books of the Maya.

Uthman ibn 'Affan, the third Caliph of Islam after Muhammad, who is credited with overseeing the collection of the verses of the Qur'an, ordered the destruction of any other remaining text containing verses of the Quran after the Quran has been fully collected, circa 650. This was done to ensure that the collected and authenticated Qur'anic copy that Uthman collected became the primary source for others to follow, thereby ensuring the Qur'an remained authentic. Although the Qur'an had mainly been propagated through oral transmission, it also had already been recorded in at least three codices, most importantly the codex of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud in Kufa, and the codex of Ubayy ibn Ka'b in Syria. Sometime between 650 and 656, a committee appointed by Uthman produced a singular version in seven copies, and Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered any other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.

-- source: Wikipedia

In 1656 the authorities at Boston imprisoned the Quaker women preachers Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, who had arrived on a ship from Barbados. Among other things they were charged with "bringing with them and spreading here sundry books, wherein are contained most corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines contrary to the truth of the gospel here professed amongst us" as the colonial Gazette put it. The books in question, about a hundred, were publicly burned in Boston's Market Square.  On 8 May 1844, the Irish St. Augustine Church, Philadelphia was burned down by anti-Irish Nativist rioters. The fire also destroyed the nearby St. Augustine Academy, along with many of the rare books in its library - though in this case the arsonists did not specifically target the books, but rather sought to destroy indiscriminately everything belonging to Irish Catholic immigrants.

In 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was firebombed and destroyed by Serbian nationalists. Almost all the contents of the library were destroyed, including more than 1.5 million books, including 4,000 rare books, 478 bound manuscripts, and 100 years of Bosnian newspapers and journals.   The Amazing Grace Baptist Church of Canton, North Carolina, headed by pastor Marc Grizzard, announce it was holding a book burning on Halloween 2009. The church, a King James Version-exclusive church, hold all other translations of the Bible to be heretical and considers both the writings of Christian writers and preachers such as Billy Graham and T.D. Jakes and most musical genres to be heretical expressions.

-- source: Wikipedia

When Virgil died, he left instructions that his manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burnt, as it was a draft version with uncorrected faults and not the final version for release. This instruction was ignored.