‘Where they have burnt books,” the poet Heinrich Heine once wrote, “they will end in burning human beings.” For Shaun Bythell, it may be more a case of burning his own fingers.

Bythell, the 34-year-old proprietor of The Bookshop in Wigtown, is an affable man who looks a little like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Ordinarily, he is not the type to give offence. Yet today he will risk the wrath of his neighbours in the small Galloway town when he holds a public bonfire of old and unread books.

Bythell’s problem is one most bibliophiles face sooner or later: he has too many books — about 80,000 at the last count — and almost no chance of selling many of them. Hence this afternoon’s event.

Some of the books destined for the pyre have torn covers, such as the copy of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Confusion, which he fingers rather reluctantly before consigning to one of the “to-burn” boxes. An aged volume of GM Trevelyan’s Shortened History of England has been warped by damp and one less-than-careful previous owner has torn all the colour plates out of Otto Herman’s Birds Useful and Harmful, rendering it useless.

It is unlikely that anyone will miss Sewage Treatment Design and Specifications or Miller’s Antiques Guide 1994. But other doomed works have little wrong with them apart from falling from fashion.

“Take these old Penguin paperbacks of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga,” says Bythell. “They didn’t even sell after the recent TV adaptation. A lot of the books we get are from people of a certain age moving into smaller houses, and I suppose there is a raft of authors that that generation might have read who are more or less forgotten now.” He reels off a list: Charles Morgan, Francis Brett Young, Dennis Wheatley.

Mass popularity is no defence either. Many works by Britain’s bestselling authors will be ashes before the evening is out, among them Catherine Cookson, Alistair MacLean and the Poldark creator Winston Graham. Does Bythell have any second thoughts about torching the bestsellers along with 3,000 other titles? “Not really,” he says, with the nonchalance of a Torquemada. “I’ve got a soft spot for Alistair MacLean but that’s not the point. Once you’ve consigned it to be burnt, that’s it. Selling-space is at a premium.”

Not that this is an ordinary bonfire. Two local artists, Norrie Steele and Julie Houston, have been brought in to design a grand method of incineration. The event takes place on the pagan festival of Beltane — in the area in which the horror film The Wicker Man was shot — so they have come up with something suitably pyromaniacal.

The burning will take place at 5pm in Wigtown’s Martyr’s field. As the name implies, it is not a place with the happiest of histories. In this lonely part of Galloway in 1685, a widow called Margaret Maclachlan and a farmer’s wife, Margaret Wilson, were sentenced to die. The women were Covenanters, Presbyterians persecuted by Charles II. Tied to stakes on the marshy plain, they sang hymns as the sea rose round them.

Today the spot overlooking the Solway Firth is marked by a simple stone memorial. Near here, a chimney of books is being built on a platform supported by four telegraph polls. This will be filled with straw and sploshed with diesel, then topped with a wire basket full of books. Readers (or perhaps non-readers) are invited to bring any books of their own they wish to get rid of. Literature’s loss will be art’s gain. To make it a properly festive occasion, there will also be a barbecue.

How many locals will actually attend is a moot point. One complication is that Wigtown is no rural backwater. In 1997, it became Scotland’s National Book Town and transformed itself economically. It has 25 book-selling businesses and many owners are understandably reluctant to burn the hand that feeds them. “It’s taken so long for us to get to this position,” says one. “Do we really want people to think, ‘Oh, Wigtown, that’s the place where they burn books’?” But the root of most objections is not about marketing or public opinion. It is far more instinctive, proof that book-burning remains one of the West’s most enduring taboos. Michael McCreath is chairman of Wigtown’s book festival, which takes place in September. “The whole thing has such horrendous historical connotations,” he says.

“It seems somehow more shocking than cutting a cow in half and pickling it in formaldehyde. My job is to support writing, so this is not exactly what I’d be doing.” Although a friend of Bythell’s, McCreath is keen to stress that the burning has nothing to do with this weekend’s Spring book festival.

McCreath is not alone in his reservations. “I think it’s fair to say most folk are either strongly against it or warily against it,” says Ian Wood, whose science-fiction bookshop 451F is named in honour of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a totalitarian society in which books are burnt.

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