Tackling the paper tiger

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 10

Tackling the paper tiger

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN London The Japanese may have trouble dumping their radioactive waste, the Aboriginal ; may find it hard to throw away an old boomerang, at least so that it stays thrown; what I can't get rid of is books. Good books that are sent to my newspaper office can be sold or given to hospitals, but it seems mean to corrupt the sick with books glorifying Hitler, soft-porn about little girls, or tracts urging that we flog juvenile I delinquents. So I have just taken an armful and watched them pulped by the 1 metal jaws of the garbage I cart. I feel awful. And I’ve! just realised why. Every tribe has its ritually sacred objects with which good faith is demonstrated, bargains struck, agreements solemnised. For some it is peacock feathers, for others, lumps of green stone. In our case, it is not, as you always thought, money. It is paper. Just look at the way we go on. We go to a shop, pick up something already wrapped in enough plastic to keep it dry for a month at the bottom of the sea — yet for the deal to be complete, it must be wrapped in a paper bag and come with a paper receipt. We go to the theatre; and since no theatre nowadays can afford to hire more than four actors, their names could perfectly well be chalked on a board at the side of the stage. Yet we do not feel the occasion has been blessed until we have a paper programme in our hands*.

Even a bus journey requires a paper bus ticket to sanctify it. And no conference can welcome its delegates without a supply of paper handouts, even if it is only a duplicate of the announcement that invited you there in the first place. In our society, no-one can be born or employed, get * married, buried or taxed a form being filled. We suspect no-one reads the I forms; of course no-one I reads the forms. The form is 'simply a sacred scroll; to 'read it might even reduce! the magic. Why do we keep copies of letters sent? Nine times out of 10 it is a complete waste of time, as I have demonstrated by not keeping more than about two a month for the last 10 years. We scrawl “said no or “told him to ask his doctor 6/5/75” or “get lost letter sent 25/7/77” on to the originals — and -we don’t even keep them long. But by holding paper as well as giving it, the average office feels it has somehow let less power go from it, lost less mana. DESPOLIATION And if paper is sacred, then books must be even more so. In “The Times” recently, a man wrote to the letters’ page applauding the action of some library that had chucked out a lot of old books to make room for newer, better books. As a publisher of newer, better books he thought this was absolutely splendid. Every literate Briton was appalled:

we thought we were shocked because we remembered iGoebbels having the Jews’ books burnt in 1932, but it iwas not that; it was the despoliation of the holy subi stance. It is because books are made of paper and television screens are not that the older generation gets in such a state about its young [ learning by audio-visual I methods instead of good old ! textbooks and exercises. And I realise now that we were wrong to think that I the school child of the last ' century who used a slatel and squeaky pencil had the j slate taken away for the] | sake of the teachers’ nerves. I | Not so; it was simply an j i egalitarian move to give the I I infant squeakers as much of the precious paper as their betters. If you work with a book, | you know you can get far I more out of it by turning I down pages, underlining I things and writing in the| margins; but it feels so, wicked that most of us rarely do it. So we actually get less from the book than| we would if we did not re-j spect it so much; like a [ Hindu who could stave off starvation by eating his cow — if only it was not so sacred. The high priests of the religion are the librarians, and they not only hate all those who may borrow books (potential desecrators), but even those who have written them in the first place. A thriller-writer recently addressed a bunch of librarians about the Public Lending rights issue — a move in Britain to get authors paid a small sum for every borrowing from a public library to keep the author halfway alive and solvent. The writer said he got the feeling they would have liked him to starve; like the male mantis who dies when he has performed his one useful But why should he have been surprised that the priests prefer their saints safely canonised and dead? They are in the relics business; they are paper-wor-shippers. And so are we all, with the marks made on the paper getting more irrelevent every day. | So whatever you think of this article, you can always wear it next to the skin — it will act as a sacred talisman in your time of need. —O.F.N.S. Copyright.