The proposed book disposals from the National Library involve burning our heritage.

Sometimes in a second-hand bookshop there is a huge pile of recently acquired books. You look through it recognising old favourites and ones you wish you had known about, the orthodox and the progressive, the classic and the eccentric, the fashionable and the obscure, the over-represented and some lacunae. You know you are looking at the intellectual life of some anonymous deceased collector. You wish sadly you had known her or him. You wonder about those who made the decision to destroy the collector’s intellectual presence as surely as a cremation destroys the body. Did they care, or were they so post-literate as to not understand what they were doing?

I had a similar feeling when I looked though the list of books which the National Library is proposing to dispose from its Overseas Published Collections – some 600,000 or more books. The preliminary notification lists only 60,000 books in the Dewey Decimal classification from 000 to 310, but that is sufficient to indicate the astonishing destruction of a major library, exceeding Julius Caesar’s burning down of the Library of Alexandria which held the equivalent of about 100,000 books.

The National Library is not disposing of everything. It explicitly states that ‘no items from the Alexander Turnbull Library collections will be part of this initiative’, nor will the legal deposit collection of books published in New Zealand be affected. Rather, these are books which it has acquired to give New Zealanders access to books from overseas. But it includes books by New Zealanders published offshore (including one to which I contributed) and even books that specifically mention New Zealand in the title.

It is hard to comprehend the size of the proposed destruction. Specialists in the listed categories – computer science, information & general works, philosophy & psychology, religion and social sciences (only part is listed) – will go through their subject list with emotions ranging from sadness to anger. Those whose subjects are yet to be listed – language, science, technology, arts & recreation, literature and history & geography – must wait their turn.

Apparently the justification for the mass disposal is a narrow view of New Zealand. ‘Our collection needs to work for New Zealanders. A significant part of our role as stewards of Aotearoa’s documentary heritage is to preserve the memory of New Zealand and our place in the Pacific. No other library in the world is going to collect and preserve our stories, that's our job.’ Are overseas published books not a part of our stories?

Let me illustrate this with a topic that is yet to be listed. Presumably in the literature section of the Overseas Published Collections are books about Shakespeare, who is perhaps only second in importance in our heritage to the Bible – which could also be used to illustrate the aridity of the proposal. (Try telling our Pasifika people that the Bible is nothing to do with their story.)

In my book, Not in Narrow Seas: The Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand, to be published this year. (I am pleased to report it is a local publisher, VUP; presumably otherwise it would be disposed of.) I write:

            The great Indian economist Amartya Sen said Beethoven was an Indian. Then the great composer must also be a New Zealander, as is Jesus, Shakespeare and many other luminaries who not only lived elsewhere but did not even know the islands existed.

Now suppose you are a little New Zealander and discount this sentiment. Even so, you would be faced with the fact that some of the world’s leading Shakespearian scholars are New Zealanders (this is a fact not a boast). I suppose they could go through the disposal list and reserve out all the books to which our scholars contributed. But what about the books not written by New Zealanders with which those scholars were engaging and which need to be read to understand their engagement? But would we not also have to reserve all the books about the Elizabethan and the Jacobean periods which they are writing about, including those in the language and history sections? And what about the works about periods that precede them, and those which come after since Shakespearian performance and criticism is a part of the totality of the study of the master?

The issue does not apply only to Shakespeare. The Alexander Turnbull Library is very proud of its Milton collection. Presumably the disposal list will include works on Milton and his period. This is a reasonable assumption since the published list includes works on William Blake, another poet (and painter) of whom the ATL is proud.

Where does it end? Twenty years ago Vladimir Nabokov would not have come to mind. Now I know New Zealand has one of the world’s leading Nabokov scholars. Who will pop up in the next twenty years?

I have used a literary illustration because it is central to our common heritage. Economics is not seen that way (the point of my book), but I went through the economics section with a specialist eye. There is much to relate but I confine myself to a couple of instances.

One of the laws of New Zealand explicitly rules out the use of the ‘Baumol-Willig rule’. You do not want to know (not in this context anyway), but you will be not surprised to learn that their works are on the disposal list, despite the two being an integral part of our story.

In my experience, the National Library gives economics a low priority. Yet I was astonished at the quality of the economics collection it is proposing to throw out. The reasons for doing so are that they have only limited space, which is limited by funding. ‘Resources’ and ‘funding’? They are economic concepts, are they not? If the National Library were to pay a little more attention to economics, it might understand better what is happening to libraries and seek an alternative way. But that failure is a national trait.

Another instance is the proposed economic history disposals. My book argues an obvious – but too often forgotten – point that to understand the British nineteenth-century migrations and the characteristics and attitudes of the migrants one needs to understand what was happening in Britain in the nineteenth century. And of course to understand nineteenth-century Britain you need to understand eighteenth-century Britain, and back to Shakespeare’s day and earlier. (While we are back in the seventeenth century, note that one of the British statutes enshrined in our law is the 1689 Bill of Rights. Try to make sense of that without a thorough knowledge of those times.) They are proposing to dispose of all of those books as well, I suppose.

And they are disposing of books about Australia, thinking, presumably, the Aussies are nothing to do with our story. (The decision was made before the latest Blackcaps tour.)

My history book does not talk a lot about the background to our Asian peoples. The big inflows are too recent to be able to make good historical judgements. But when updating the book in a couple of decades, attention will have to be given to Asia too. By which time, if the disposal operation has its way, all the books about Asia will be gotten rid of too.

Other than for the very small-minded little New Zealanders the point is clear. Our story involves the story of the whole world. Disposing of books about the rest of it is a retreat into unreality.

I do not object to the National Library purging some of its books – not 600,000, but each after careful individual consideration. Nor do I think the whole of New Zealand’s story need be in the National Library alone. I could quite understand the University of Auckland being our Nabokov library – providing New Zealanders have the same access to it as they have to the National Library.

Yes, the world of the book is changing; the potential impact of e-books is intriguing. But let’s not meet the challenge by pretending that we are isolated in a marginalised bunker somewhere in the south-west Pacific.