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We are now at a point in literary studies where the modernist bookshelf is certainly being overhauled, with a scrupulous eye to bleaching it of prejudicial coloring. However, acts of restitution can sometimes be self-fulfilling, especially as guided by the imperatives of creolizing bookshelves. In other words, the line between coloring and uncoloring wears worryingly thin as writers who lend color to the canon are incorporated in the name of an allegedly colorblind academic and intellectual expansionism but where their slippages and departures from the (white) modernist canon become both the criterion and the casualty. This essay takes Jean Rhys's "The Day they Burned the Books" (1960) as entry point to argue that in this later story as in her interwar writings, the writer ironizes processes of circulation and incorporation, and hence offers commentary on academic and literary circuits, and indeed her own resurrected currency within these. If modernism is seen as that originary moment of miscegenated literary and cultural landscapes in the west, and given that new modernist studies continues to draw on that prospect of coloration, then Rhys's story comes back to haunt those claims of color-transcendence, or alternately an active coloration, by locating the debate in the color-fraught colonial Caribbean. This later story approaches changing literary structures via Rhys's brushes with the modernist moment, whether contemporaneous or current and in the process nudges us to think about the curatorial procedures that undergird and 'color' the idealized democratic conception of sites such as libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]