The Mohammedan reason for destroying books--"If they contain what is in the Koran they are superfluous, and if they contain anything opposed to it they are immoral," seems, indeed, _mutatis mutandis_, to have been the general rule for all such devastators.
The Invention of Printing made the entire destruction of any author's works much more difficult, so quickly and so extensively did books spread through all lands.

On the other hand, as books multiplied, so did destruction go hand in hand with production, and soon were printed books doomed to suffer in the same penal fires, that up to then had been fed on MSS.

only.
At Cremona, in 1569, 12,000 books printed in Hebrew were publicly burnt as heretical, simply on account of their language; and Cardinal Ximenes, at the capture of Granada, treated 5,000 copies of the Koran in the same way.
At the time of the Reformation in England a great destruction of books took place.

The antiquarian Bale, writing in 1587, thus speaks of the shameful fate of the Monastic libraries:-- "A greate nombre of them whyche purchased those superstycyouse mansyons (_Monasteries_) reserved of those librarye bookes some to serve their jakes, some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe theyr bootes.

Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers, and some they sent over see to yeS booke bynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to yeS, wonderynge of foren nacyons.