Public Library in Chennai condemns

CHENNAI, August 20: The Connemara Public Library in Chennai, a landmark in the City for long, has gathered up thousands of vintage books from various corners of the vast building, and piled them up for the incinerator, having condemned them as being beyond salvaging. Pages from a treasure trove of books, published since 1933, were floating about outside the building, and valuable tomes like `The English Works of Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1901)’ are on the verge of destruction. This shocking and tragic example of lack of maintenance and poor management is only the latest in the list of attempts at unauthorised `weeding out’, where badly damaged books were either consigned to the flames or sold to the `raddiwala’.