WHO QUALIFIES as the biggest book-burner in history? Caliph Omar, the Muslim potentate who (as legend has it) torched the library at Alexandria? Savonarola, with his Bonfires of the Vanities? Josef Goebbels who, whenever, he heard the word culture, reached for his petrol can?

My personal vote would go to our own Bomber Harris. When the RAF firebombed Dresden in February 1945 it incinerated some of the finest library collections in the world. Of course, as Harris's defenders point out, books were collateral damage. As were some 35,000 Dresdeners.

Matthew Fishburn's fascinating chronicle follows ritual book-burning through the ages, from the Old Testament's Jeremiah to those latter-day descendants of the venerable Caliph, who burnt The Satanic Verses in Bradford in January 1989 (warming the publisher's hearts in the process - nothing gets a book headlines faster than angry flames licking round it).

Burning a book is a symbolic act. Those pages, clamped between board, have a sacred aura: even today, when our reading matter is produced on assembly lines like so many cans of baked beans. Whoever said: “Where baked beans are burnt, men are burnt?” But we still gravely nod our heads with the poet Heine who said that about burning books. Ironically there was no author Goebbels liked more to get a good blaze going with than that uppity Jewish versifier.

I have a colleague, an art historian, who demonstrates the nature of culturally sacred objects by giving undergraduates a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, and a pin, with the instruction to poke out the gioconda's eyes. It stirs up primitive feelings. Some students simply can't bring themselves to do it. So too with book burning. It doesn't feel illiberal: it feels blasphemous.

Matthew Fishburn is an Australian bookseller by profession. He loves what he sells - and he loves to explore odd crannies of the book world. What makes Burning Books so impressive is the author's going well beyond the usual instances. How many times have we seen those tired Third Reich newsreels of the bonfires in Berlin, in 1934?

Fishburn directs our attention to less familiar examples. A couple of British kids on YouTube taking ten minutes (“ten minutes!”) to burn a paperback of Lord of the Flies, “with a lighter, an aerosol can, and some perfume - singeing their hands in the process”. Or the mother of a friend who cremates each new novel by Peter Carey. What's going on in such little vandalisms?

Fishman relishes paradox. We are directed to pictures of the burning (as theatrical as anything Goebbels perpetrated) of Nazi books in postwar Germany. The Third Reich, as part of its “Bibliocaust”, actually preserved vast troves of Judaic books in “depots” - for the purpose of high-

minded post-genocidal scholarship once they'd rendered Europe “Judenfrei”. When Freud sardonically commented: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me; now they are content with burning my books,” he got entirely the wrong end of the stick. The Nazis preserved many more books than they destroyed. Bastards.

Fishman is peculiarly enlightening on the strange psychologies of book burning. Why, for example, wholly liberal figures (such as Virginia Woolf) toyed with it as a good thing. Or the moral contortions we high-minded readers go through where “dirty books” are concerned. In 1667, Fishman records: “the saucy French novel, L'Ecole des Filles was condemned and burned in London. Samuel Pepys, although sternly disapproving of the work, was unable to resist buying a clandestine copy, hurrying home with the ‘idle, rogueish book' and staying all night reading it. The following morning he burnt his copy, ‘that it might not be among my books to my shame'.”

Lolita has always had book-burners' fingers itchy. But the first person to try to burn the pedophile classic was Nabokov himself. His wife Vera kept hawking the manuscript out of the fire.

In modern times, as Fishburn notes, book burning has faded from the scene. Partly it's the improved technology of pulping. Partly it's that Goebbels has given the practice a bad name. Partly it's obsolescence: how do you burn an e-text? How will some future Caliph Omar be able to destroy the great Google Library (some five million texts), available to us (at a price) later this year?

Fishburn's next book will “investigate the graffiti written on bombs during the Second World War”. Bomber Harris may star in that one, as well.

Burning Books by Matthew Fishburn
Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99; 256pp
Buy the book from Books First £17.99 including free delivery

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