An iconic UK bookstore is offering visitors the opportunity to vandalize Harry Potter books for 25 pence. The Bookish Type, the trans-owned bookstore in Leeds running the promotion, will donate all proceeds to gender-affirming healthcare costs. Good fundraising idea or bad messaging? 🤔
fantastic idea
Books are precious, but not to the point you can't deface them or reuse them in ways that you want/need, especially not a dime a dozen copy of a popular series.
This is art. It's activism, it's demonstration. And the money goes to a good cause. So good all around.
i think people need to get a grip around the fact that a state or other governing body banning/destroying books is bad because it stems from intent to control people's knowledge and what kinds of ideas can be expressed and shared.
it's not that, like, astral nazi particles are created whenever anybody of any social status or authority fucks with any book.
Speaking as a librarian:
I've destroyed books. Dozens of books. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and The Hobbit and Dog Man and Avatar: the Last Airbender and and and...
They're not precious irreplaceable artifacts, a lot of them are printed on shit paper bound with shit glue and they fall apart after enough readings. I used them for art projects and library decor and cut them into bookmarks. We bought more copies.
This ^ sounds like a great fundraiser, especially if it's a used copy that was donated or picked up cheap. Depending on edition, this title has between 250-400 pages. Which means excluding stuff like title page, publisher info, flyleaves, etc, this fundraiser is making MINIMUM £60 for gender-affirming healthcare. Maybe £55 if the book was purchased specifically for this fundraiser.
Established in 2019, The Bookish Type is an independent LGBTIQA+ bookshop at 58 Merrion Centre, LS2 8NG. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10-6.
I used to volunteer at my local library, helping sort books that were donated for the book sale. That's where I realized that there are, actually, books that are actively dangerous and that need to be destroyed.
Outdated medical and child-care books.
I saw numerous books of all types, most of them - if they were sound of binding and decent of page quality - I sorted into the correct genre box without more than a glance. I always checked the publication date of any medical or child-care books, though, and anything older than five years went straight in the bin. They're both fields where what we know is growing and changing very rapidly, and also where the wrong information could ruin or even end a person's life. It was genuinely more responsible to destroy those books than to risk letting them wind up in the hands of someone who wouldn't realize they'd need to fact-check the contents for safety.
