When Your Books Won't Fit On Your Shelves

"In the second chapter of Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll dreamt up the following solution: 'If we could only apply that Rule to books! You know, in finding the Least Common Multiple, we strike out a quantity wherever it occurs, except in the term where it is raised to its highest power. So we should have to erase every recorded thought, except in the sentence where it is expressed with the greatest intensity.' His companion objects: 'Some books would be reduced to blank paper, I'm afraid!' 'They would,' the narrator admits. 'Most libraries would be terribly diminished in bulk. But just think what they would gain in quality!' In a similar spirit, in Lyons, at the end of the first century, a strict law demanded that, after every literary competition, the losers be forced to erase their poetic efforts with their tongues, so that no second-rate literature would survive."

--page 70