And now, to continue my beating of this dead horse.

Just out of curiousity, I went to the website of the book-destroyers featured in this posting. To really feel some pain, check out their one-of-a-kind offerings.

For example, "Memoirs of a Polish Baroque Prince" - translated into English and printed by University of California Press. Let's say that I'm a fan of Polish arts and letters, and on seeing this book killed, I decide to acquire an unslaughtered copy for myself. What easier way to find a copy than to go to Amazon?

Alas, the 1976 first edition (edited by Caroline Leach) is unavailable at any price - Amazon's various partner merchants of out-of-print books won't be much help there. There are a few copies of the 1980 second edition available, but the cheapest is for $50.00. The most expensive copy sells for well over $300.00.

So what does this tell us (aside from the fact that the folks at Secret Storage Eviscerated Books maybe oughta check out eBay and Amazon from time to time before they pick up the knife)? This tells us that in a very real and direct sense, the specific people who are offering these specific hollowed-out books are destroying books that are otherwise unavailable.

And so again I say, "PAIN!"

Oi!

On the one hand, my bibliomania is pretty full-blown, and that certainly colors my reaction to book-disembowling. On the scale of pathological hoarding, I'm somewhere below the rank of "Likely to be Crushed by Accumulated Newspapers" and somewhere above the rank of "Unconsious of the Number of Pens Taken Home From Work." As Boing Boing has taught us (if it has taught us nothing else) hoarders like me rarely have an accurate sense of the true economic value of things, and we tend to ascribe considerable economic value to trash.

So you should certainly retain some skepticism regarding my opinion. Nevertheless, I really do feel a stab of psychic agony when I see an orphaned book left to the cruel knives of the hollowers.

Halloween Jack (poster #16), I know that as a librarian, you must necessarily take a much less sentimental view toward books. After all, it's unlikely that the destruction of one, or ten, or a thousand copies of Moby Dick is going to significantly diminish the availability of Moby Dick in the world, and there's only so much shelf space and money in the library budget. Something's gotta give.

But I know from my experiences of libraries public and private, good and bad, rich and poor, large and small, that the tragedy of the library selling off or pulping a forgotten Robert Benchley collection (say, e.g., "After 1903 - What") or a turn-of-the century illustrated travel guide ("Lost Cathedrals of Belgium") is that while those unhappy books may not be the last of an otherwise globally extinct line, their destruction nevertheless does result in a local extinction. To wit - the library no longer possesses those books; their names are expunged from the local catalog. Their geographic range is constrained.

A locally absent object will not be missed (when I checked "Lost Cathedrals of Belgium" out of a college library collection in 1985 (Ah, youth, how fleeting), I was only the second person to have done so in the last 60 years, and so as rare as the book was, it wasn't exactly feelin' the love), but if that book is destroyed the intellectual diversity of the library is diminished.

Do we all like the consequences of "the long tail"? In other words, do we all enjoy the benefit derived from ready access to the forgotten and unpopular bits of art and thought that pile up in the corners of our culture? If we do, doesn't it feel a wee bit dirty to decrease the richness of the local information field?

Now, one might say, "But what if I'm looking at 6 outdated editions of the '1984 CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics?' or an outcast, outdated volume 'A-B' of the 1996 Martindale-Hubble Lawyers' Directory? These are monstrous big hard-backed tomes that have all the immediacy of an old newspaper."

True dat. Notice that I didn't extend blanket amnesty to all books - I mean, how would Kitty Kelly feel, knowing that I would happily preside over the mutilation of her work? And notice that the Moby Dick carcass being so mis-used in the photo illustrating this story isn't some cheapy newsprint-paper mass-market edition. I mean, damn, but that thing looks pricey.

To quote the laconic silicon Horta of the original Star Trek (with credit to the equally laconic translator, Mr. Spock), "Pain!"

I, like Joshua Z., have always felt awful about book-hollowing. The act carries the same moral taint as taxidermy or clear-cutting. It's so mean and destructive of that which we might someday miss and hope to hold in our hands one last time. For instance - that edition of Moby Dick looks like it was beautiful, once. Now it's dead. One might as well have killed a real whale and then hollowed out its carcass so that one would have a place to hide one's spare house key.

(And as someone who read Moby Dick for fun a few years ago, let me assure doubters that not only is it the second-greatest American novel (behind Huck Finn), but it is surprisingly quick, modern-sounding and funny, and not the unreadable slog that it is so often misrepresented as being. So take that, all you Melville-hate-ahs).

I mean, look at the poor commenter whose mom inadvisedly tore the guts out of "Last Days of Pompeii," an influential Victorian novel written by one of the most prolific novelists of his age, the incomparable Bulwer-Lytton. And sure, his novel "London" has the stupid opening "It was a dark and stormy night ...." sentence, but still, it's hard to argue with success, and ol' B-L was the Harold Robbins of his era.

Its not just that great (or rare, or notable) books should be spared this ghoulish act. No book great or small, rare or common, deserves this sort of treatment, not while someone in the world might benefit at all from the words contained within that volume (although I suppose exceptions might be made for certain vermin-like works such as the paperback Warlords of Gor series, the Kitty Kelly unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan, or "The Celestine Prophecy").

I suspect that this has garnered nearly 50 posts (so far) because of the intensity of feeling that those of us who hate and cannot understand this stupid graphic experience. That, and our frustration and sense of being cut off from those of you who do seem to understand this graphic.

I have to say that at first glance, I thought I understood the graphic, in a sort-of superficial "oh, I guess they're really busy during weekend afternoons," way - seeing the red pie slice as some sort of visual exclamation point. But then I began to ask myself if I could figure out from this odd chart when the store is actually open. Um ... let's see .... They close for one hour on weekdays (from 9 to 10 p.m.) and for two hours on Sunday (from 8 to 10 p.m.)

Or ... at least that's how it looks to me. I strongly suspect that those of you who do understand the graphic are probably also capable of seeing the images in those godawful alleged "magic pictures." Well, sir, I hail from the lands of Astigmatia and Dyslexia, and I'll have none of your left-brained deviltry!