The trouble with books is that people will read them

From American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan, page 23.

Several years ago, at a meeting of book collectors, I was brought up short by the remark of a man who valued books as most of us do. It was at Brown University's John Carter Brown Library, and one of the luminaries present was a gentleman, considerably older than I, whom I respected and revered but frequently quarreled with. We were both members of several historical societies at which I had read papers. At the conclusion of each of my talks, he had risen to denounce me for a young radical and had pointed out with characteristic vigor that my papers were full of the most utter nonsense. "I admire," he used to say, "the thoroughness of Mr. Morgan's research, which is matched only by the absurdity of his conclusions."

I don't think he thought I was a communist or an anarchist, but perhaps that I believed in free love or the New Deal or something on that scale of monstrosity. There had, nevertheless, grown up between us, at least I like to think there had, a certain affection and respect of the kind that may take place between people who recognize each other as opposites.

On this occasion I was in a happy position of neutrality. I had not delivered the paper, and consequently he did not feel obliged to denounce me. I therefore thought that this might be a rare opportunity for conversation in which we might find ourselves in agreement. I discovered him examin-ing a case of books in which was displayed a particularly handsome copy of Purchas his Pilgrims (1625). He was intent on his examination of the book and made a fine figure as he bent over the case, of long white hair that contrasted dramatically with the dark woodwork. I stood beside him for a time in silence, and then ventured the only remark that I could think of and one that seemed thoroughly innocuous—namely, that this copy of Purchas was remarkably clean, looking as though it had just come off the press.

As soon as I had spoken, he turned on me with eyes blazing and said yes, indeed it was, and he hoped that it would remain in that condition, unlike the books in the Harvard Library. "That's the tragic thing about the Harvard Library," he said, "that fellow Jackson* lets those professors go in there and read those books any old time they have a mind to."

I beat a hasty retreat. But it has often occurred to me since that my friend, who gave a great deal to the Harvard Library, the John Carter Brown, and many other libraries, was more right than he knew. He was a man who hated change in any form. And there is no more insidious instrument of change than a library in which Professors or students or people in general are allowed to read the books.

In fact, in view of what books have done to change the world, it is strange that those who fear change have not succeeded in burning them all long since. The trouble with books is that people will read them. And when they do, they are bound to get new and dangerous ideas. Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work. And the ideas are not always benign. One thinks at once of Karl Marx, laboring through the musty volumes of the British Museum and emerging with those notions that turned the world upside down. Or the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris—how much, one wonders, did its volumes contribute to the French Revolution?