I get the idea of the quote, but I don’t think “book” was the right word. Story, idea, or information would have been better. A book is a physical manifestation of a story, idea, or information. As something physical, it can be destroyed. Have you ever seen a book versus fire? It’s made of paper. It will burn. You can remember the book, what it looked like, etc, but what you remember more is the story or idea (at least, it should be if you read it.) The idea can live in your memory regardless of what happens to the book. It’s still there if you return it to the library, you lose it, or it burns to ash. The idea can not be killed by fire.

Then I also go to thinking about how the idea could also die. What if an author wrote one copy of a book, never told anyone what it was about, no one ever read it, the author died, and the one copy was destroyed in a fire? Heck, you can even imagine the book and author died in the same fire. I’d say that idea died. It can be debated philosophically that the idea would probably come to someone else, but I consider this idea to be dead just as ideas that have not yet been thought of can’t really be considered alive.

While I understand the point that FDR was trying to make and I agree with the idea, I see holes, although I see fewer than when I read that quote out of context and thought “Books can’t burn? They elected this man to be president?!” Because that small snippet of the quote can be taken out of context, I believe it was a poor choice to use that little bite on the poster. Even without the editing though, there are still problems. It took a long time to wait for my 400 pages to print, double-sided, as I fed additional paper in, so I had a lot of time to think about this. It’s what being an intern is all about.

Back to my point. I got to thinking about how much I missed writing essays. I’ve always enjoyed writing essays, ever since we learned about “The Hamburger Structure” for constructing your paper with the beefy arguments sandwiched in between the introductory and concluding buns. I like to think the sesame seeds were the hook. Since graduating from university last summer, I haven’t had the opportunity to write an essay. I’ve copyedited the essays of others, but that’s about as close as I’ve gotten recently. I want to write an essay. Nothing fancy, maybe it won’t adhere to the hamburger structure as religiously as my past works. Maybe it will become so casual that it’s not an essay at all, like this one, but the point is that I can ramble about the things I thought about while mailing and get my writing fix. It’s win-win for me (but questionable for you, the reader.)

Hopefully you enjoy this. Hopefully you read this. Hopefully you’ll get a chuckle.