Now That Is The Kind Of Book Burning I like

In 2011 BBC Northern Ireland
adapted the book 'Christopher And His Kind',
a memoir of life in 1930's Germany by Christopher Isherwood.

They filmed the script in Belfast.
This afforded the locals the glorious sight
of their City Hall shrouded in swastikas,
which raised many eyebrows
and caused many knowing smiles
about the sad state of provincial politics.

Better than that, a book burning scene
was part of the script. The BBC contacted
every local charity shop in Belfast asking
for all the books donated to them
that the public won't buy second hand,
because the print run is bigger than the author's talent.
The sort of  books where the publishers hope
was that the author's fame would sell
the book and disguise how leaden their prose was.

The BBC probably paid the charity shops
for these literary sloppy seconds by weight,
thus creating a win-win scene
in which one book infused with talent,
'Christopher and His Kind' became the means
of temporarily cleansing one small corner
of the world of books in which the hope
of translating talent into sales
was solely down to the publishers' PR department.

I forgot to ask, did the BBC's fires
also burn the deadly prose of 'Mein Kampf'?

Vanity Publishing

used to be a cottage industry
where small printing firms
bought advertising space
in semi-literary magazines,
to lure authors without agents
into believing that their talent
was worth the price
of the private printing their book.

It now means micro-talented youths 
who to prove that they have survived
been extruded through the mincer of fame,
extract more money from their fans,
and prove they have a personality
append their names to ghost written tomes
that pretend to be their lives.
Where the writing loses all the life
there was in it, before it is typeset.

Pity the trees pulped for such ventures,
pity the wildlife the trees no longer support.
Modesty is their undoing.

Pity the pseudo-sincere charity shops
that try to resell these mis-begat books,
now unsaleable, that devalue the charity
that they are for. The ghost writer industry
can move on, find others to write for
as fame becomes vanity
and the cause for further writing.