A loader poured thousands of library books into a dumpster. Then the librarians explained why (yalereview.org)
Her sharpest loss isn't the text — it's the marginalia. Studying Edith Wharton's annotated books taught her that a careful reader's notes in the margins are a conversation with the author, and that conversation goes in the dumpster too.
Then a librarian flipped it: this is routine collection management, not a tragedy. The same week, that exact library acquired one of 11 surviving copies of a 444-year-old book. The fight in the thread is over what a library is actually for.
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