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Historians typically regard the deliberate destruction of books as a means of censorship and ideological control. The First Qin Emperor’s (259–210 BCE) infamous campaign of “burning the books and burying the scholars” (fenshu kengru) in 212 BCE, for instance, became a byword in later periods for the tyrannical repression of knowledge. In the seventeenth century, however, a significant number of Chinese writers—including some of the leading poets and critics of the period—began to reevaluate book burning as a positive and potentially productive activity. My talk reexamines this phenomenon by looking at the most notorious case of self-inflicted book burning in the Qing - Zhou Lianggong’s (1612–1672) decision to set fire to the wooden printing blocks for his collected writings in 1671. Zhou’s bibliocaust synthesizes three broader trends: 1) a hardline Neo-Confucian view that print corrupts learning; 2) the valorization of erasure in the transmission of women’s poetry; and 3) the idea that book burning had become a means of self-preservation among Ming loyalists and twice-serving ministers. By reconsidering the complex interplay between these trends, I show how the re-evaluation of book burning in seventeenth century scholarly circles illuminates a neglected yet distinctive aspect of late imperial textual culture: namely, that intellectuals responded to a proliferation of books from the sixteenth century onward by prioritizing subtraction over addition. For these thinkers, editing was not simply a matter of preservation and dissemination, but also of curation through destruction.