There is More than One Way to Burn a Book.

Fox News Bashes Libraries

File this under "Read and Weep."

Anna Davlantes, a Fox Chicago News anchor, picked a fight with librarians and book lovers this week when she posted an editorial with the incendiary headline, "Are Libraries Necessary, or a Waste of Tax Money?"

"With the internet and e-books, do we really need millions for libraries?" Ms. Davlantes wrote. "[S]hould these institutions -- that date back to 1900 B.C. -- be on the way out?"

Yes, Ms. Davlantes. The libraries in Alexandria burned down more than four thousand years ago. But, our libraries are fortresses of the First Amendment, not inactive Facebook accounts in need of deactivation. Free access to libraries is essential to our intellectual and political freedoms. As a television journalist, Ms. Davlantes processes and prioritizes information differently than others. The nature of television, and the internet, de-emphasizes the quality of information. If she were to get her way, books wouldn't be banned, they'd be banished. Readers, browsers, writers, civil libertarians and assorted others need to join together to support our public libraries. Open access to information, as well as critical thinking, is at risk. Realistic choices can only be made in the light of adequate information. Public libraries, which are composed of books and digital bites, provide that light. Petition the removal of Fox from the Be Kind to Books Club. Better yet, seek out and join the American Library Association's Freedom to Read Foundation.

By way of background, Ms. Davlantes is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. A native of Chicago, she grew up in Rogers Park and is a graduate of Lane Tech High School. Her favorite book, apparently, is Fahrenheit 451. While not exactly the book burning fire captain in Bradbury's classic ("Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."), Foxes with matches scare me. Parenthetically, Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Lawrence Clark Powell Library. There he found refuge from his small house and two smaller children. Close a library, maim a society. Perhaps, kill a classic.

Ray Bradbury on Fox TV -- Boy, is this Ironic!

In a 2007 LA Weekly interview, Ray Bradbury, while sitting in front of a giant TV tuned to Fox News, talked about how Fahrenheit 451 was greatly misunderstood.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point."

Almost sixty years on, Fahrenheit 451, which was once science fiction, now appears to have been prophesy.

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The Publishing Story Behind Twain's Unpublished Autobiography

Is it More Generous to Wait for Your Friends to Die Before Publishing an Autobiography?

The Independent reports that the University of California, Berkeley, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography -- much of it previously unpublished. Clearly, Mark Twain could have said hundreds of unpleasant things in print about his contemporaries while he was alive, but he decided against it. Whether for the benefit of his children, or because he feared reproach (and libel lawsuits) of those he might wound, in 1909 he agreed to his publisher's plan to put his autobiography under seal for 100 years. In addition to delaying publication, he and his publisher agreed to an ingenious marketing plan to promote the book from beyond the grave.

Authors sell books. So, publishers are often stymied by the untimely (pre-publication) demise of an author. As a rule, shades of dead authors don't do much to hand-sell their books. Not so with Mark Twain. According Eugene Exman's The House of Harper, Twain's inability to promote his forthcoming autobiography may have been greatly exaggerated. In Exman's book, he reports that one-hundred copies of Twain's memoirs were to be signed by Twain before his death. In the year 2010 they were to be redeemed by the original purchasers' heirs for an additional payment of $50.00. As an aside, if the heirs of the original purchasers are anything like you and I, this brilliant marketing plan will likely be foiled due to lost claim checks.

While Twain did not want to inflict unnecessary wounds on those he wrote about, he clearly wanted to deal out justice from the other side, and make certain his memoir had maximum impact when it was published. One has to wonder if the one-hundred signed copies was a turn-of-the-century fabricated trade news story, or whether a Mark Twain time capsule with a trove of signed first editions resides somewhere in the Harper archives.

Was Twain's Publishing Contract the First to Include an Electronic Rights Clause?

Twain was a gadgeteer. He was an early adopter of new technology. According to his unpublished autobiography, he claimed that he was the first person in the world to use a typewriter for writing literature. Attaining a modest competency of twelve words per minute, he abandoned the typewriter in the late 1870s because he found it was "degrading his character." Having been in several legal scrapes, Twain valued the advice of his publishing attorney, whose fingerprints are all over his forward-looking 1909 Harper Bros. agreement. Informed most likely by his dual interests in the law and novelties, Twain's publishing agreement is distinguished by what may be the first "electronic rights" or "future technology" clause to appear in a publishing contract.

Under the 1909 handwritten agreement, his publisher received rights to publish his memoir in whatever modes should then be prevalent, that is by printing as at present or by use of phonographic cylinders, or by electrical methods, or by any other method which may be in use." [Emphasis added].

To paraphrase Twain, his autobiography is likely the last ship to leave his literary shipyard. Unlike many authors, the delay was "not purposeless, but intentional" -- right down to the the turn-of-the-century Wild Wild West-like (as in James West and Artemas Gordon) "future technology" clause.

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