BOOK BURNINGS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 31, 5 August 1933, Page 17

BOOK BURNINGS

There have been book burnings in England in the past,'but tho biggest on record was the result of an accident, and was not deliberately planned like that which tho Nazis have- arranged for the benefit of their followers, says a writer in tho '"Manchester Guardian." It is impossible to estimate either the quantity or the quality of.' the literature that must have perished in the Great Fire of London. A prodigious amount of manuscript must have gone up in the flames; and of printed matter the biggest single loss ■was probably the- majority of those- £20 plays in the writing of which Thomas Heywood claimed to havo had "either an entire hand or at least a main finger." Greater; perhaps, than the destruction of 200 of Hoywood's plays was the loss of his "Life of Shakespeare," which, if it'had been preserved, would have spared the world the ingenious speculations of Ignatius Donnelly arid Miss Delia Bacon on the authorship of Shakespeare's, plays. The last book -burned in Eifgland by authority was an cdMion of a work whose author, by a tragic coincidence, shared the same fate. The Calvinists burned at the stake in a field outside Geneva Michael Servetus,-the1 learned Spaniard who is supposed to have'anticipated Harvey in the discovery of the circulation of the- blood. That was, on October i 27, 1553, butl nearly 200 years later, on May 27, 1723, a copy of the book, " Christianismi Eestitutio," for writing which Scrvetus suffered death..- by fire, was seized at the instance of Dr. Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, and burned by the common hangman. It had come into the possession of Dr: Mead, afterwards physician to George 11, and arrangements were beiiig made for a reprint when the bishop intervened. A few. copies were saved, ■and the book was duly published with,out anybody being a whit the' worse.