Sheltered in the bunkers beneath the National Library in New Zealand’s capital rests a treasure trove of books, including nearly 2,200 first editions that have been carefully looked after for decades. But not for much longer.
The “overseas collection” – which includes a first edition of Richard Neville’s Play Power, a 1912 edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and multiple first editions of Graham Greene novels – is now headed out the door.
In total, the National Library in Wellington plans to get rid of more than 600,000 “foreign books” from their collection, saying they need to make space for more works on New Zealand, of which there are an additional 80,000 to 90,000 to store each year.
In a promotional video by public relations agency Double Denim (whose bill was paid by the Department of Internal Affairs) national librarian Bill Macnaught said the overseas collection would now “spark joy” in other places.
“No other library outside of New Zealand is going to collect all the stories of New Zealand, that’s our job at the National Library, we’re going to make more room for the New Zealand, Māori and Pacific collection,” Macnaught said, defending the cull.
Some 625,000 books are now in the process of being “rehomed”, as the library puts it, but the mass cull has caused despair among the country’s academics, historians, researchers and scholars, who say a literary crime is taking place in a year when many New Zealanders are distracted by the global pandemic.
“I weep, I literally weep, when I look at the lists of books that are going and I know are not available anywhere else,” says Michael Pringle, an independent scholar.
Hundreds of thousands of valuable and important books on religion, race, health, feminism and psychology will be removed in the cull, including works that are now out of print, and in some cases unable to be found anywhere else in the world, scholars say.
The library says it plans to offer the books to local libraries, and then to prison libraries and charity book sales.
Director of content Rachel Esson told the Whanganui Chronicle the library’s own librarians would review the titles before they were scrapped, but scholars say subject specialists need to be brought in as matter of urgency, before any more are lost.
“The cost of maintaining these older overseas titles is massive,” Eason said. “Our job as the National Library of New Zealand is to maintain books from our own country.”
Scholars say once taken from the care of the national collection, the books are in effect lost, and many of them could end up destroyed.
The collections of the National Library are so valuable, anything to be removed has to be signed off by a government minister.
“This dangerous, wholesale destruction must stop,” says Pringle. “We all agree you could maybe take out 20% of the collection, but it needs to be a slower and more deliberate process, with subject experts consulting throughout”.
Some treasures have already been saved. While trawling the cull lists, writer Chris Bourke found a first-edition copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which sells for upwards of NZ$1,000. That copy has now been rescued by a North Island library, while the entire Holocaust collection has been claimed by New Zealand’s Holocaust centre, after it was alerted to the situation by Victoria university historian Dolores Janiewski.
“Some of the books are very valuable so I have been extremely disturbed by this plan, and distressed,” says Janiewski, who, like other scholars, donates her time to trawling the lists, looking for books to save.
“I am very concerned at where the books will end up. Who they are letting take the books away is unclear, as is whether they will ever be accessible again.”
The Guardian requested an interview with the national librarian of the National Library, Bill Macnaught and internal affairs minister, Tracey Martin.
According to a sample of 250,000 books from the overseas collection run through Internet Archive, just 25% had been digitised.
Although culling in libraries is common practice, it is the scale of this cull that is alarming book-lovers in New Zealand, with opponents of the move including some of New Zealand’s literary heavyweights, such as the former poet laureate Vincent O’Sullivan, and writer and former librarian Dame Fiona Kidman, who describes the cull as “cultural vandalism”.
“If you only have New Zealand books, it makes for a very narrow literature. Any great literature is founded on the literature of the past,” she told the Dominion Post.
Janiewski says books written by New Zealanders but published overseas are also heading for the slush pile, as are the back stories of New Zealand’s vast immigrant and diaspora population. Herself a migrant, Janiewski describes the country as a nation of immigrants: “We have never lived in isolation.”
“I am appalled by what seems to be a very narrow definition of New Zealand and what makes up our history and stories,” she says. “In some regards books are now being seen as out of date, old-fashioned and not useful any more. But paper lasts, if it is taken care of, for a long time. Electronic knowledge is not necessarily kept or retained or preserved.”
Richard Ovenden is the 25th librarian of the Bodleian library in Oxford, and has recently written a history of book destruction, titled Burning the Books.
Ovenden writes that in the modern world, it is not so much flames that threaten the survival of books, but a “creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritisation and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge”.
For writer Chris Bourke, like many who use and love the library, the loss of so many books is heartbreaking.
“The National Library should be the Fort Knox of our intellectual treasure, the idea of just removing the whole lot, holus-bolus, goes against every kind of instinct for what the library’s purpose is,” he says.
“We are an island, but to act like that on a research level is very damaging, and evident of nationalism in an unhealthy way. We will regret this for generations – you can’t go back once it’s done.”