The Survival of Books

by Robert McHenry

Over my desk hangs a large print of a photograph (seen below) taken in London during World War II. It is of the library of Holland House, one of the great houses of London from the time of its construction early in the 17th century until its ruin in the Blitz of World War II. In its long life as the town home of the earls and later the barons Holland and their descendants, it was frequented by leading figures in English life. In the 18th and especially in the 19th century it provided hospitality to men of letters: Joseph Addison, who died there; Lord Byron; Thomas Babington Macaulay; Sydney Smith; Horace Walpole; Charles Dickens; and Sir Walter Scott, among many others. Small wonder that the library was large and well stocked.

One night in September 1940 the house was largely destroyed by German bombs. But the library – perhaps fortified by the weight of those books, perhaps (let us imagine) defiant of the book-burning Nazi regime – stood. The roof fell in, great beams hung precariously, but the shelves were mostly intact and the books remained quietly and neatly arranged in their proper order.


What strikes us most forcefully is the men’s sangfroid. Surrounded by the wrack of war, they stand in silent contemplation of the books.

Merely British stiff-upper-lip? Perhaps. But it seems more than that to me. The men are not, after all, queuing for the No. 47 omnibus.

I have seen a website (it is with pleasure that I omit to provide a link) in which a modern, I should doubtless say postmodern, scholar calls this photograph “an image of the fetishization of the text,” followed by some more dismissive silliness. To me it is an image of respect, all the more remarkable for the circumstance. It is respect for learning, for what man has achieved since moving out of the trees and the caves, expressed all the more poignantly amidst the evidence of the fragility of that achievement.

Make no mistake: The temporary survival of the library at Holland House was sheer happenstance. The next bomb might well have turned those books back into the wood pulp from which they were manufactured and the thoughts in them into a fading memory. But bombs are not required to do that. Not only books but the whole fabric of civilization exists even now at the sufferance of the least intelligent, the most violent, or the most cynical among us.