The Blog

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!