How Books Die

April 23 is UNESCO World Book Day and over at the Kenyon Review Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky has a gloriously hangdog post about how books die:

If books are dust, then in this they are more like us than these flashes of light that you now read. Fragile, but strangely enduring, they are made to carry life. (And often made, it seems, with as little care, in momentary acts of commerce between fame and greed.) We’ve found better ways to cast our seeds, but none as moving, just as we’ve created more efficient objects of our inarticulate desires, and yet none so enduring.

Link.