1940 Book-burning has huge significance – from the library of Alexandria, through Savonarola and Goebbels to the incineration of The Satanic Verses by enraged Muslims in Bradford.
The biggest book bonfire in England occurred in the early stages of the German Blitz in 1940. Since the introduction of the craft of printing in the 15th century, the heart of the British book trade had been located in the small area around St Paul’s in London – Paternoster Row.
Between the 20th-century wars it was still the centre point, dominated by Longman’s (the oldest surviving commercial firm in the country) and Simpkin and Marshall’s huge wholesale warehouse, which distributed books to all parts of the British isles.
St Paul’s Cathedral survived the Sunday raid (as its predecessor, in the Great Fire of London, had not).
But over a million books went up in flames on that awful night. Seventeen publishers’ premises were totally destroyed. As George Bernard Shaw noted drily: ‘The Germans have done what Constable’s [his publisher] have never succeeded in doing. They have disposed of 86,701 sheets of my work in less than twenty-four hours.’
One of Simpkin and Marshall’s warehousemen recalled his impressions next morning:
I went up on the Monday morning and all the Simpkin Marshall staff were standing in Ludgate Hill, surveying the ruins. We had heard there’d been a heavy raid, and set out not knowing what we would find. But what we saw was indescribable. I had never seen such desolation in my life. Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Land and bordering onto Ludgate Hill was a scene of smouldering ruins, and what had been Simpkin Marshall’s was just a heap of rubble.
Paternoster Row, and its adjoining streets, was now – as one observer put it – ‘the crematory of the City’s book world’.
But it wasn’t. The raid demonstrated the extraordinary resilience of the British book trade (which, amazingly, contrived to export more product in wartime 1941 than it had in peacetime 1939).
Longman’s catalogue was reduced overnight from 6,000 titles to twelve available to the retail trade. But within a month (using trestle tables and improvised lighting) they contrived to rebuild their backlist.
Organisationally, the 29 December raid had long-lasting and benign results. No ‘Leviathan’ wholesaler replaced Simpkin and Marshall (only very recently have the Amazon and Barnes & Noble electronic catalogues rivalled its stock range). Instead publishers came to rely on ‘sales reps’, who built up personal connections with bookshops, creating an immensely sensitive feedback mechanism (the British book trade, unlike its American counterpart, has never – until recently – believed in ‘sale or return’, itself a kind of Blitzkrieg technique). The ‘organic’ nature of the British book trade owes much to the sales-rep system.
The other benign effect of the Luftwaffe’s malignity was the diaspora of the book trade to more spacious areas (Harlow in Longman’s case) where it could expand to become a 20th-century industry.