Shattering the Muses by Rainer J. Hanshe & Federico Gori

Televisions schedules have lately featured many programmes following chronic hoarders as they try to overcome their pathological behaviour. The process is always the same: film crews enter outwardly normal homes to find labyrinths of cardboard boxes, magazines and newspapers stacked to the ceiling. Interviews with the inhabitants follow that invariably reveal the hoarding is compensation for a great absence. When attempts are made to clear a room, the owner panics and refuses to let anything go. One man in his sixties insisted on keeping a school textbook found at the bottom of a box because, he said, he was thinking of becoming a teacher. When told it was forty years out of date and useful to nobody, anxiety and confusion contorted his face.

In every programme the viewer becomes a witness to the destruction of hope, with the house clearance acting like L-Dopa on one of Oliver Sacks' patients catatonic for the last forty years slowly discovering their true age. But all is fine in the end because, in the last ten minutes of the show, the hoarder always relents and allows the team to clear and redecorate the house. As the credits role, we see them smiling with friends and family, ready for a fresh start.

Watching what is effectively the same programme over and over emphasises how closely possession and dispossession coincide: a man who holds onto a book as the promise of a better life finds its absence delivers exactly that. It's a concurrence that also gives pulse to Shattering the Muses, a beautifully designed, large format book from Contra Mundum Press, whose pages are illuminated by the flames of the bonfires it documents.

In a stack of quotations, short essays, anecdotes, poems, slogans, drawings and photographs, the book records proclamations against written works from biblical times to those announced by the Nazis, and from the loss of a few books at an airport to the cataclysm in Jaffna. And while there is no obvious narrative, some pages do tell stories, most notably that of Miklós Radnóti as he wrote poems secretly on a forced march across Hungary, hiding them in his jacket.

In the appropriately ominous prose of the blurb, it is said the book "proposes that 'apocalypses' are not eschatological, but ontological, ever-present, continuous events that threaten us", which is certainly borne out by the content. But there is plenty of evidence that Shattering the Muses is not the straightforward humanistic lament over man's inhumanity to manuscripts that this suggests.

There is a tendency to think like the hoarder who sees only what can be 'cashed out' in the world, which we see frequently in newspaper headlines about newly discovered works by famous authors that will potentially "shed light" on them and "enlarge our knowledge". Silence is not something we can talk about in public. It isn't what we expect. It isn't the right kind of knowledge. Perhaps building a library is an attempt to make silence physical.

Whenever the lost books are mentioned, I think of Kafka's Berlin notebooks confiscated by the Gestapo. If only Dora Diamant had given them to Max Brod! Her biographer Kathi Diamant has organised a search of archives in the hope they are somewhere in eastern Europe. It's a thrilling idea: new works by Kafka. And if I daydream about the moment a researcher opens a file and recognises Kafka's spidery handwriting, I wonder also about our uncertain relation to the works we do have. It might be that silence, an apocalypse of sorts, rises up before us there, in every extant work. Is this why we seek the new?

Adding to the hoard might demonstrate a misunderstanding of what Kafka's work reveals to us or, worse, a betrayal. He wrote a story – The Silence of the Sirens – in which Odysseus puts wax in his ears so he could not be lured by the sirens' song. But Kafka adds a further twist on the classical story and says "the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence". With his ears blocked, Odysseus is the only one who fails to hear it. "And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never." Perhaps the absence of Kafka's stories is their great gift to us and why he was so keen to destroy them.