STEPHEN KEEGAN,
Sir, - I found myself as shocked as Cormac Lowth was (May 23rd) upon encountering bookcases in Dublin pubs with their contents glued in place. Garrett Fitzgerald (May 28th) suggests that the practice is an effort to enhance security but I believe it is evidence of an image-obsessed culture. Surely, if security issues were so important, it would be better to have no books at all, rather than a thin facade of literary paddywhackery.
We should be grateful that book-burning is unheard of in modern Dublin but, as the author Ray Bradbury once noted, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." - Yours, etc.,
STEPHEN KEEGAN,
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Killiney Avenue,
Co Dublin.