Would You Step on Your Neighbor's Head Over a Book?

Though books are among the noblest expressions of civilization, like other art forms they can be dangerous. Authors have been imprisoned and even executed because of them. Libraries have been sacked and books destroyed in bonfires because of the ideas they contained. Of recent memory, a fatwah was issued against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, and the Turks prosecuted an author under Law 301 forbidding "Unturkishness" in books published in their country.

There is little risk, however, that bookstore employees will be trampled to death by customers rampaging through their shop aisles on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that customarily initiates the holiday shopping season. Unlike stampeding shoppers who fatally ran over a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday this year, bookstore shopping was conducted with the decorum one expects from well bred ladies, gentlemen and children, as I personally observed in a Barnes & Noble store in New York's Lincoln Center area.

Books are worth fighting for and even dying for. But they're not worth killing your neighbor over. Supplies are abundant, and if your store runs out of stock, it will be replenished soon enough, or you can buy it online.

Let people beat each other's brains in over 32-inch flat-screen TV. Book shoppers, the cultured guardians of civilization, browse bookstore shelves, quietly make their selections and queue up patiently to pay for their purchases. Dignity and order prevail. They leave the shop clutching their books like talismen against the barbarism that would crush a living soul to death for a bargain on an X-Box at a discount store.

We are not animals. We are people of peace, we book people.

RC