From a Wall Street Journal commentary by Lance Morrow headlined “Requiem for a Dumpster Full of Books”:

The dumpster behind the arts center in our upstate New York village is filled to the brim with discarded books—thousands of volumes. The mass grave is an unsettling sight to someone who was brought up in the worship of books.

The dumpster out back seems at odds with the sign in front of the arts center, which proclaims its annual “Festival of Books”: “More than 15,000 affordable, gently used books” for sale, all of them donated by locals. The thousands of volumes in the dumpster are the cull—the ones judged too damaged to be saleable.