An arsonist tried to destroy the library at the University of Missouri the other day.
From a piece in the Missouri Review about it...
Getting barred from the library can be enough of a problem for those of us who typically spend a lot of time there. But the news of the violence done to our building is additionally troubling, as we have gotten no word on why someone would do such things to a library, of all places.
Admittedly, it’s most likely that this young man (identified in the newspaper story linked above) wanted merely to harm property, and there, manifested in the library, was a large building full of it. Better to destroy fragile computers in a library than desks made of metal and wood in a classroom building. But that explanation is insufficient, as far as my partner and I are concerned, and we’ve been utterly bewildered as to what a library had ever done to this man, to make him want to inflict his vandalism on it.
Destruction of libraries goes probably as far back into our history as there have been libraries to destroy. In 1258, the Mongols conquered Baghdad and destroyed its Grand Library, throwing books into the river and murdering scholars, or so I’ve just learned from Wikipedia. Perhaps the most notorious case of library destruction in human history is the burning of the Library of Alexandria, which, it turns out, you can easily spend half an hour reading about online without realizing how much time has gone by.
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