May 10th is the 75th anniversary of the the most infamous (at least from our modern western perspective) book burning in history–the Nazi’s youth corps idea roast in Berlin in ‘33. In memory, the people at AbeBooks have collected a bunch of book banning and burning links.

People have burnt books for almost as long as they have printed them. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are regularly torched for promoting witchcraft. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses were burned by Muslims in 1988 for allegedly insulting Islam. Burning a book is a symbolic act – words are not just being suppressed, they are being destroyed by fire. In reality, the Nazi burnings were a very public, very threatening public relations stunt. The real impact was felt in homes, libraries and bookshops. Ray Bradbury once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”