21 Feb 2026
Let’s Burn Our Books… We Have the Internet
On Thursday, February 19, 2026, amid the relentless stream of articles that appear daily online, one headline caught my attention: “Let’s Burn Our Books: The Posturing of Those with the Biggest Libraries.” Published in El Mundo, a major Spanish center-right newspaper, the article is signed by Iñako Díaz-Guerra: journalist born in 1977, graduate in journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid, head of the paper’s Sports section, whose biographical note on the newspaper’s website specifies that he “spends quite a bit of time writing forewords for books written by others, because he feels a dreadful laziness about writing one himself.”
The subtitle sets the tone: “Why do we grant books a higher status than other cultural products? If your answer is anything other than ‘pure posturing,’ you are lying — or lying to yourself.”
Since those are the only two options, according to Don Iñako, I must confess that I have spent most of my life lying to myself. I grew up surrounded by books; I learned to think, to feel, and to express myself with them; and I made it my profession to gather as many as possible before dispersing them to other posturers like myself, who were probably just as unaware.
You will have understood by now that I am not a neutral observer. I do not accumulate books to match a shelf with the color of a wall. But rather than taking part in the debate about the supposed posturing of book lovers and library owners (whatever the size of their shelves), it is above all the invitation to “burn our books” that prompted me to react.
Such an invitation has, indeed, something slightly nauseating about it. For the bookseller that I am, in today’s world — which sometimes seems ready to assume (wrongly, I hasten to add) a future from which the book would have disappeared — the untroubled call to burn those that remain takes on the air of a rather sadistic persistence!
So, posturing and vanity? Please leave us your reflections. Without matches!
Montesquieu considerava inutile un libro che parlasse di altri libri. Se questo poteva avere un senso nel diciottesimo secolo, quando la stampa era in piena espansione, non ne ha altrettanto oggi che i libri sono in pericolo, minacciati dall’intelligenza artificiale e da Internet.
Mantenere desto l'interesse sulla carta stampata e quindi sui libri è operazione necessaria per contribuire a formare un'opinione generale che possa salvarli dall’irrilevanza.
La Letteratura è ricca di opere nelle quali ad un certo punto si parla di libri e di biblioteche. Cervantes, Manzoni, Musil, Stendhal, Melville, Swift e tanti altri sanno che il carattere intrinseco di un personaggio, le opinioni prevalenti in un ambiente sociale, vengono meglio chiariti elencando i libri di cui possono disporre ed -eventualmente- condividerne il testo.
Ma spesso le librerie citate non si limitano a fornire l’ambientazione per le storie, a palesare le conoscenze bibliografiche di un autore, ma assumono valenze simboliche diventando metafora dei rapporti complessi che legano l’uomo alla sua storia e alla parola scritta.
Trattare i libri come esseri senzienti, come persone vive nel microcosmo di ogni biblioteca, vuol dire immergersi in una realtà atemporale, dove le possibilità di interazione e conoscenza sono infinite.
Mantenere desto l'interesse sulla carta stampata e quindi sui libri è operazione necessaria per contribuire a formare un'opinione generale che possa salvarli dall’irrilevanza.
La Letteratura è ricca di opere nelle quali ad un certo punto si parla di libri e di biblioteche. Cervantes, Manzoni, Musil, Stendhal, Melville, Swift e tanti altri sanno che il carattere intrinseco di un personaggio, le opinioni prevalenti in un ambiente sociale, vengono meglio chiariti elencando i libri di cui possono disporre ed -eventualmente- condividerne il testo.
Ma spesso le librerie citate non si limitano a fornire l’ambientazione per le storie, a palesare le conoscenze bibliografiche di un autore, ma assumono valenze simboliche diventando metafora dei rapporti complessi che legano l’uomo alla sua storia e alla parola scritta.
Trattare i libri come esseri senzienti, come persone vive nel microcosmo di ogni biblioteca, vuol dire immergersi in una realtà atemporale, dove le possibilità di interazione e conoscenza sono infinite.
Dear “DIDEROT”,
Thank you for this thoughtful contribution, and for letting a little Italian wander through the shelves of this blog. On a site where readers borrow the names of writers, it seems only fair that the languages of Europe should also circulate among the books.
You invoke Montesquieu’s famous remark about books that speak of other books - and I cannot help thinking that the Encyclopédiste whose name you have chosen might have smiled at the paradox. After all, entire volumes of the Encyclopédie could be read as conversations about knowledge already written elsewhere.
Your reminder that libraries in literature often reveal the soul of a character is very true. Cervantes knew it well when he inspected Don Quixote’s shelves, and many writers after him have done the same. A library is never merely furniture in a story: it is often a portrait.
And I particularly enjoyed your final image: books as living presences in the microcosm of a library. Librarians sometimes suspect that this is not entirely a metaphor.
So thank you for adding this voce italiana to the discussion!
Thank you for this thoughtful contribution, and for letting a little Italian wander through the shelves of this blog. On a site where readers borrow the names of writers, it seems only fair that the languages of Europe should also circulate among the books.
You invoke Montesquieu’s famous remark about books that speak of other books - and I cannot help thinking that the Encyclopédiste whose name you have chosen might have smiled at the paradox. After all, entire volumes of the Encyclopédie could be read as conversations about knowledge already written elsewhere.
Your reminder that libraries in literature often reveal the soul of a character is very true. Cervantes knew it well when he inspected Don Quixote’s shelves, and many writers after him have done the same. A library is never merely furniture in a story: it is often a portrait.
And I particularly enjoyed your final image: books as living presences in the microcosm of a library. Librarians sometimes suspect that this is not entirely a metaphor.
So thank you for adding this voce italiana to the discussion!
