Packing My Library is a wonderful book. There are not many books that I finish and immediately begin to read again. Anyone who loves Borges will find fascinating references to him and to the Library of Buenos Aires, not to mention the origin of the city, as just one of the many dimensions that give this book so much depth. Alberto Manguel is somewhat cryptic about why he had to pack up his library in France but the real treasure in this book is his relationship to his books indeed to books in general.

I am reminded of a particularly moving cultural insight that came to me from the head Librarian of the Library of Nicaragua during a period of my life when I was a part of an international group developing a metadata standard called the Dublin Core. After our meetings, over drinks, we would often discuss some of the cultural characteristics of metadata implementation. These were fairly archetypal: the Germans were worried that the details were not fully resolved, the Americans saw commercial advantage, the French were concerned about equity of access and the Australians and the Nordic countries just ran with it. But the Latin Countries wanted nothing to do with it (the metadata standard). After one of our meetings in Seattle, I found myself talking to the Nicaraguan Librarian and asked her why?

She told me this story...in Nicaragua there was a very wealthy man who had spent a great deal of time and money assembling a large private library. He loved his books. He spent as much time as could in his library communing with his books. He let it be known to the Library of Nicaragua that when he died he intended to leave his library with lots of money to the Library of Nicaragua. Years passed. One day he died and sure enough he had left the Library of Nicaragua his library and a significant sum of money to care for his books.

If his had happened in the UK or Germany or the USA etc, the books would have been packed into boxes and found their way to catalogers who would have checked the quality of each book against existing holdings, perhaps pasted a book plate in the front saying. 'donated by...', applied a Dewey Decimal number etc. Some of the books but not all may have found their way into the shelves beside books of similar subjects or by the same author.

Not in Nicaragua.

Instead the Library of Nicaragua spent a significant portion of the money building a wing onto the Library of Nicaragua that closely resembled the library of the benefactor. Then, very carefully, the books were moved into the exact positions that the benefactor had placed them n his own library. What was most important to the Nicaraguans was neither the books nor the content of the books but the man's relationship to his books.

Packing My Library has this quality. A man in love with books. A mind able to see beyond their content into how books frame our perceptions of the world.

This is a poignant book for me because I am beginning the process of doing the reverse - of unpacking my books. The books I have not seen since 1988 with the additional challenge of absorbing my dead parents books. It's a hands-on process for me because I'm milling the timber to make the shelves of my library - I estimate about 20,000 books or 250m of shelves...

There were notable passages in Packing My Library such as, '...this style of thought, for want of a better term, allows us to believe that the world around us is a narrative world, and that landscapes and events are part of a story we are compelled to follow at the same time as we create it.' ( )

The musings of a literary friend, a wanderer in the world of books and literature. I have seldom read a book that expresses the love of reading better than those by Alberto Manguel. ( )

Few pages from the last, a dribble of coffee from my lips and onto "reflection". The mark remains forever.

Please find my review at my blog.

https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/03/book-review-packing-my-library-by.html ( )

A short set of meditations on the relationship between humans and books, starting out from Manguel's personal reaction to having to put his private library (35k books) into storage due to the sale of his house in France, and winding up with the more public dilemma of being put in charge of Argentina's National Library ("about 3-5 million books") and having to come up with a coherent formulation for the role of a national library in 21st century civic life.

Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my library", which gave Manguel his title, talks about the way the books we own have meaning as physical objects, carrying memories of the circumstances in which we acquired them or the people who owned them before us, something Manguel also feels quite strongly (can another copy of Don Quijote ever be the same as my copy?), but going beyond that he is also fascinated by the way books gain meaning from the decisions we take on how to shelve them and the sometimes unexpected company they find themselves in as a result. But he's soon off far beyond that, talking about the way books relate to reality, imagination and dreams, about religious ideas of the power of words and images, about books versus political oppression, about golems, Dante, Humpty-Dumpty, Jules Verne, Borges, and much else. ( )