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I'm another who can't see any logic in destroying obviously valuable centuries old Shakespeare volume. Because it would take "too much time" for the staff to remove the library checkout card? huh???? Just how much time does it take for a well educated librarian to sort that list, pick out what are obviously the valuable books and send an employee out to retrieve them. If nothing else, put them in a large room and sell admission tickets to book collectors to go in and search through and find what they want. Somebody could then sit at the door with a book of collector price guide and negotiate the selling price as they leave. They'd make money from that. I volunteer every time our library has a used book "Friends Sale" and those EBAY and Amazon marketplace sellers show up at the crack of opening dying to go through what is there. It takes about 2 minutes to collect their money and stamp out the "Property of" marks as they walk out the door.
But the fact of the matter is .... where does the value of a book lie? Is it the paper, or the words? If a book is going to sit untouched and unseen in a warehouse for over a century, how valuable is that? I agree that destroying a collector book like that is morally reprehensible, but Shakespeare isn't going to disappear because of it.
One of the reasons digitization of literature is so important is so that a book never has to die because of water or smoke damage, lack of storage space, it went out of print, or it simply has been lost in a box or in the stacks at the British Library.
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