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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
"The starting point is a question," Alberto Manguel writes in the introduction toThe Library at Night: since few can doubt that the universe is ultimately meaningless and purposeless, why do we try to give it order? After all, our efforts are surely doomed to failure. It's hard to think of a more profound or serious subject to start with -- butThe Library at Night,Alberto Manguel says, is by no means a systematic answer. Rather, it is the story of the search for one. In the tradition ofA History of Reading, this book is an account of Manguel's astonishment at the variety, beauty and persistence of our efforts to shape the world and our lives, most notably through something almost as old as reading itself: libraries. The result is both intimately personal and incredibly wide-ranging: it is a fascinating study of the mysteries of libraries, a thorough analysis of their history throughout the world and an esoteric, enchanting celebration of reading. It is, perhaps most of all, a book that only Alberto Manguel could have written. The Library at Nightbegins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel's own library at his house in western France -- a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits, as well as broader ones about the nature of categories, catalogues, architecture and identity. Exploring these themes with a deliberately unsystematic brilliance, Manguel takes us to the great Library at Alexandria, and Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence; we sit with Jorge Luis Borges in his office at the National Library in Argentina, travel with donkeys carrying books into the Colombian hinterland, and discover theFihrist, a chaotic and delightful bibliographic record of medieval Arab knowledge. There seem to be no limits to Manguel's learning, or his ability to illuminate his investigations with magical, telling details from the past. Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, this book considers libraries as treasure troves and architectural spaces; it looks on them as autobiographies of their owners and as statements of national identity. It examines small personal libraries and libraries that started as philanthropic ventures, and analyzes the unending promise -- and defects -- of virtual ones. It compares different methods of categorization (and what they imply) and libraries that have built up by chance as opposed to by conscious direction. Although it is encyclopedic (and discusses encyclopedias assembled by Diderot and fifteenth-century Chinese scholars alike) and full of concrete historical analysis (including a brief investigation of the prejudices underlying the Dewey Decimal System) this book is animated throughout by a gentle, even playful sensibility: it is governed by the browser's logic of association and pleasure, rather than the rigid lines of scholarly theory. After all, everything in a library is connected: "As the librarians of Alexandria perhaps discovered, any single literary moment necessarily implies all others." In part this is because this is about the libraryat night, not during the day: this book takes in what happens after the lights go out, when the world is sleeping, when books become the rightful owners of the library and the reader is the interloper. Then all daytime order is upended: one book calls to another across the shelves, and new alliances are created across time and space. And so, as well as the best design for a reading room and the makeup of Robinson Crusoe's library, this book dwells on more "nocturnal" subjects: fictional libraries like those carried by Count Dracula and Frankenstein's monster; shadow libraries of lost and censored books; imaginary libraries of books not yet written.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
In this sotto voce lucubration, Alberto Manguel rhapsodises about the library he has had constructed for himself in an old French barn, where he likes to read at night, and also about his smaller, separate study, thus prompting him to reflect in a terribly civilised manner on the essential differences between one's personal library and one's study. This might cause anguished pangs of envy in writers blessed with fewer square metres to play with, but fortunately Manguel explores libraries beyond his own: from the fabled one at Alexandria onwards, each chapter considers libraries historical and fictional in a different thematic light: as order, as space, as power, and so forth. He surveys eccentric schemes of classification, or competing ideas of architectural perfection - a circle within a square, as in the old British Library reading room; or a long rectangular hall, as chosen by Michelangelo for the Laurentian Library, and imagined by Etienne-Louis Boullee in a wondrous drawing of a gigantic ideal library, one of many excellent illustrations in the volume. The book's guiding spirit is, inevitably, Jorge Luis Borges, whom we are always pleased to meet. "To imagine the plot of a novel is a happy task," Borges said. "To actually write it is an exaggeration." Of course Manguel's book is also a confession of his love of books, from encyclopedias to Dracula . He confides a lovely hope: "In any of the pages of any of my books may lie a perfect account of my secret experience of the world." Caption: article-etc14.1 The book's guiding spirit is, inevitably, Jorge Luis Borges, whom we are always pleased to meet. "To imagine the plot of a novel is a happy task," Borges said. "To actually write it is an exaggeration." Of course [Alberto Manguel]'s book is also a confession of his love of books, from encyclopedias to Dracula . He confides a lovely hope: "In any of the pages of any of my books may lie a perfect account of my secret experience of the world."
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. This is a book for those who delight in books and libraries. In 15 evocative essays, Manguel (A History of Reading), an Argentine-born writer and editor now living in France, explores the world of words, books, libraries, literature, and imagination. Libraries serve as his focal point as he weaves together quotations, memories, biography, mythology, and illustrations. In the chapter "Libraries as Shape," the reader encounters details of stone masonry, images of a brain-shaped library juxtaposed with the first known floor plan of a monastery library, a history of reading room architecture, and snippets of biographies of Pope Clement and Michelangelo pulled together with wit and provocative insights. In "Libraries as Oblivion," the author explores the notion of books read and forgotten alongside descriptions of libraries lost to war and destruction and readers lost through discrimination and denial of access. This is not standard library history, and its strength lies not in the details but in the connections, in the lyrical web pulling together odd bits into new ways of seeing the universe of books, readers, authors, and libraries. Published originally in Canada in 2006, this U.S. edition deserves a wide readership. Recommended for most libraries and any librarian needing a reminder of the power of connections.--Jan Blodgett. Davidson Coll. Lib., NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no advantage to the description of -order. Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of -Cyrus The library in which I have at long last collected my books began life as a barn sometime in the fifteenth century, perched on a small hill south of the Loire. Here, in the last years before the Christian era, the Romans erected a temple to Dionysus to honour the god of this -wine--producing area; twelve centuries later, a Christian church replaced the god of drunken ecstasy with the god who turned his blood into wine. (I have a picture of a -stained--glass window showing a Dionysian grapevine growing out of the wound in Christ's right side.) Still later, the villagers attached to the church a house to lodge their priest, and eventually added to this presbytery a couple of pigeon towers, a small orchard and a barn. In the fall of 2000, when I first saw these buildings which are now my home, all that was left of the barn was a single stone wall that separated my property from a chicken run and the neighbour's field. According to village legend, before belonging to the barn, the wall was part of one of the two castles that Tristan L'Hermite, minister of Louis xi of France and notorious for his cruelty, built for his sons around 1433. The first of these castles still stands, much altered during the eighteenth century. The second burnt down three or four centuries ago, and the only wall left standing, with a pigeon tower attached to its far end, became the property of the church, bordering one side of the presbytery garden. In 1693, after a new cemetery was opened to house the increasing number of dead, the inhabitants of the village ("gathered outside the church doors," says the deed) granted the incumbent priest permission to incorporate the old cemetery and to plant fruit trees over the emptied tombs. At the same time, the castle wall was used to enclose a new barn. After the French Revolution, war, storms and neglect caused the barn to crumble, and even after services resumed in the church in 1837 and a new priest came to live in the presbytery, the barn was not rebuilt. The ancient wall continued to serve as a property divider, looking onto a farmer's field on one side and shading the presbytery's magnolia tree and bushes of hydrangea on the -other. As soon as I saw the wall and the scattered stones around it, I knew that here was where I would build the room to house my books. I had in mind a distinct picture of a library, something of a cross between the long hall at Sissinghurst (Vita Sackville-West's house in Kent, which I had recently visited) and the library of my old high school, the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I wanted a room panelled in dark wood, with soft pools of light and comfortable chairs, and an adjacent, smaller space in which I'd set up my writing desk and reference books. I imagined shelves that began at my waist and went up only as high as the fingertips of my -stretched--out arm, since, in my experience, the books condemned to heights that require ladders, or to depths that force the reader to crawl on his stomach on the floor, receive far less attention than their -middle--ground fellows, no matter their subject or merit. But these ideal arrangements would have required a library three or four times the size of the vanished barn and, as Stevenson so mournfully put it, "that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes." Out of necessity, my library has shelves that begin just above the baseboards and end an octavo away from the beams of the watershed -ceiling. While the library was being built, the masons discovered two windows in the old wall that had been bricked up long ago. One is a slim embrasure from which archers perhaps defended Tristan l'Hermite's son when his angry peasants revolted; the other is a low square window protected by medieval iron bars cut roughly into stems with drooping leaves. From these windows, during the day, I can see my neighbour's chickens hurry from one corner of the compound to another, pecking at this spot and at that, driven frantic by too many offerings, like demented scholars in a library; from the windows on the new wall opposite, I look out onto the presbytery itself and the two ancient sophora trees in my garden. But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence. To someone standing outside, in the garden, the library at night appears like a vast vessel of some sort, like that strange Chinese villa that, in 1888, the capricious Empress Cixi caused to be built in the shape of a ship marooned in the garden lake of her Summer Palace. In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of -self--serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe -beyond. During the day, the library is a realm of order. Down and across the lettered passages I move with visible purpose, in search of a name or a voice, summoning books to my attention according to their allotted rank and file. The structure of the place is visible: a maze of straight lines, not to become lost in but for finding; a divided room that follows an apparently logical sequence of classification; a geography obedient to a predetermined table of contents and a memorable hierarchy of alphabets and -numbers. But at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts grow louder. "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva take flight," noted Walter Benjamin, quoting Hegel. Time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness and sleep in which the world can be comfortably reimagined. My movements feel unwittingly furtive, my activity secret. I turn into something of a ghost. The books are now the real presence and it is I, their reader, who, through cabbalistic rituals of -half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up and lured to a certain volume and a certain page. The order decreed by library catalogues is, at night, merely conventional; it holds no prestige in the shadows. Though my own library has no authoritarian catalogue, even such milder orders as alphabetical arrangement by author or division into sections by language find their power diminished. Free from quotidian constraints, unobserved in the late hours, my eyes and hands roam recklessly across the tidy rows, restoring chaos. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A -half- remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful -muddle. Excerpted from The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.