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Notes -
I'll note first that I am one of those hippy-dippy people with a sacred feeling about books. I don't throw them away, I don't destroy them. It took an effort of will to become a person who writes in books, and then only for very special reasons.
I recently purchased a huge number of rare, old, or first edition books at auction. I don't intend to physically read any of the copies, they have a totemic value to me. Owning a first printing of Hemingway is something I imagine has a kind of mystical field about it, like an item in a video game.
I have trouble believing that they destroyed anything truly valuable, and rare does not equal valuable. Within the auction were many books I'd never heard of, first edition first printing, but just some airport novel about people on Nantucket published in the 80s that hasn't much been preserved or cared about or read since then.
It's possible that Anthropic purchased one of those books that is "rare" in the sense of infrequently appearing, but not "rare" in the sense of valuable or desirable.
In a sense, a book like that, a dead novel that hasn't been read in decades, has been given new and eternal life, becoming a mote within the great consciousness. Couldn't a turn of phrase or a piece of advice from an 80s airport novel become, by whatever occult means within the system, revived and returned to the discourse?
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