The Library at Night

Alberto Manguel's The Library At Night is a curious confection: ostensibly a love letter to bookishness, it rejoices in collections of books and their owners through many prisms; how they're collected, how they can be arranged (as many different ways as you like), how they represent knowledge, time or space - even how the space they occupy can express the personality or idiosyncrasy of their collector.

It will instantly appeal to those, like me, who aspire to have their own "real" library one day (I am hoping mine evolves from its current status as a mere collection of books on a few dusty shelves, though I don't know - and this is one aspect Manguel doesn't delve into - what it takes for a merely juvenile collection of books to show more matriculate to a mature library).

Manguel also describes libraries through the content of the books they hold, and his range is eclectic, from Greek poets, Arab philosophers and Jewish philanthropists to Anglo-Saxon fantasists like Shelley and, memorably, Stoker. Each new vista builds a new perspective, but curiously after these multiple shafts of light, while one is well illuminated, the general impression is no more specific than that libraries - physical libraries - are pretty neat and we'd be worse off without them.

Which, for a while, made me ponder what the point of the book really was. After all, who could disagree with that?

But then it occurred to me, as surely it did to Manguel, that *we* could, in the same way we've, collectively, disagreed that it's strictly necessary to have a record collection or a even a television any more. Books may not have succumbed quite so easily to the digital ether as did music or film - yet - but there's no reason to suppose that state of affairs is irreversible, and if dear old Amazon would kindly (!) sort out its Kindle supply chain, we might yet shortly see a precipitous decline.

Manguel's subtext is that this would be a frightful outcome. He is certainly more equivocal about digital libraries than he is about physical ones, and sees the advent of the electronic book as a threat to the legitimacy and, possibly, longevity of his bibliophilia. For what good are batty old books, occupying acres of floor-space, however splendid the architecture, when you can have millions of volumes on a portable hard drive?

This issue Manguel only really addresses obliquely, and many of his arguments to counter this position are fatuous (especially as regards the durability of electronic information). The gating issue will be whether les gens can be persuaded to curl up with a Kindle rather than a book. I haven't seen one yet, so I'm yet to be persuaded, and that question alone might save the library's bacon. But otherwise the digital realm solves many of the drawbacks (like an optimistic computer programmer, I suppose he would call them "features") of physical libraries that Manguel documents, such as their physical space and susceptibility to combustion. Such as their inherent need to be ordered one way, no matter how cleverly, to the exclusion of all others. Such as the extreme limitations they impose on the actual retrieval of information (imagine how powerful it would be to be able to Google search the text of an entire library. With a digital library, you can).

All told, Manguel adopts a narrow concept of the value of a library, suitable for dinner parties and night time expeditions, but which won't be familiar to the younger generation who have grown up with Google. Though I am sure he would hotly dispute it, I suspect Manguel would emphasise the space, spirit and idiosyncrasy of a library over its actual, textual content; he would accentuate the intellectual statement a library makes over the intellectual statements contained within it; he would value a book's spine as much as he would the pages bound by it. There is a place for that view - to a certain degree, I share it: I like visitors to my house to see my collection of books, which one day may be a library, and I don't expect them to open any of them.

But when using it in anger, when studying or writing; when I need to quickly find what I am looking for, my physical collection can irritate me intensely. At those points - real ones for genuine scholars, you would think - Manguel's cosy view seems Luddite and hopelessly outdated. For professional library users - as opposed to literate bon vivants - the Google revolution will bring only positive change to what used to be a rather painful and time-consuming endeavour.

Whilst this remains a heartfelt and warmly written elegy, it remains likely that, before long, its subject will be a bygone age. We will have to find new ways to represent our learning. The web is already generating them: perhaps Alberto Manguel should set aside his scepticism and sign up to LibraryThing, and catalogue his books there. Wonders never cease. show less

Alberto Manguel's examination of the whats, hows, whys and wheretos of libraries starts with his own private library, constructed from a mediaeval wall in France and filled with everything from ancient tomes to cheap paperbacks, and ends up... well, like a book version of a private library. He divides his book not by strict, Dewey-like categories, but rather by free association, tackling his subject from different angles. The shelves say the library as myth, the library as shadow, the library as memory, the library as home... Like any private book collector, he returns time and again to his favourites, to his favourite topics, to anecdotes he can't shake, to literary figures he relates to - ending up with the rather heartbreaking image show more of Frankenstein's monster, "disappearing forever in the Arctic ice on the frozen blank page that is Canada, the garbage dump of so many of the world's daydreams."

And yet, of course, he keeps finding new ways out of it, into it, through it, within it. Yes, he covers the basics - why do we have libraries, what is their function, what is their history - and gives us brief glimpses and stories of book collectors, writers, critics and readers through the ages. But the philosophical, poetic view he takes of his subject means that the reader ends up not perhaps with hard, sequential knowledge, but with a great deal of understanding of their meaning, both historically and to Manguel himself; a cosmopolitan, born in Israel, raised in Argentina, working in Canada, living in France, he's built a Borgesian paradise of his own in his library. As, perhaps, all of us do to some extent.

The Library At Night is a curious concoction, part history, part memoir, all love letter; like a well-ordered but chaotic library, you'll glimpse long dusty corridors full of knowledge you'll make mental notes to visit at some point, well-lit ones full of people you've already met. It leaves you pleasantly full and refreshed, just a tiny bit drunk, yet already planning tomorrow's meal. As he notes, the best libraries are round, so you can always imagine that the last page of one book leads directly into the first of the next one. show less

I so enjoyed this book, an homage to libraries of all sorts - personal, public, national, and even imaginary. Each chapter is almost an essay in its own right, though Manguel often builds on thoughts from one to the next. This book was as much over my head when it came to literature as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was over my head in science (and I was an English major!). Manguel's erudition often intimidated me, yet he is never stuffy. His musings become an interesting mix of philosophy, history, and literary criticism that made me wish my mental library was a little closer to his so that I could follow more of his thoughts. I most loved the book when he was meandering, talking about personal libraries or love of books, show more and I wish the book was my own so I could underline passages or revisit it whenever I like. show less

Alberto Manguel's latest book is The Library at Night (published in the U.S. by Yale, 2008). The book emerged, he writes, out of his quest to discover why, in the face of the knowledge that all our human efforts to "lend the world a semblance of sense and order ... are sadly doomed to failure," we still try. "Though I knew from the start that the question would most likely remain unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile for its own sake." The chapters, which all begin "The Library as ___," include anecdotal musings from Manguel's own life as a bibliophile and personal librarian, combined with always-pertinent historical background.

In his unmatched lyrical prose, Manguel treats many varied aspects of book collecting, librarianship and show more reading: library catalogs, reading out loud (I'm glad I'm not the only one who does that), the exclusiveness inherent in every library collection, Google Books, Borges' manufactured and hilarious list of "things to avoid in literature," &c. I could spend pages going through the various chapters, but I think I'll settle for just including a few quotes which I found particularly interesting:

- On the differences between a library at different times of day: "If the library of 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" (p. 14).

- On price stickers: "Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned" (p. 17). Let's just say I couldn't agree more.

- "In a library, no shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books" (p. 66). Oh, too true!

- "Books come together because of the whims of a collector, the avatars of a community, the passing of war and time, because of neglect, care, the imponderability of survival, the random culling of the rag-and-bone trade, and it may take centuries before their congregation acquires the identifiable shape of a library" (p. 165).

- "What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice. Our experience builds on experience, our memory on other memories. Our books build on other books that change or enrich them, that grant them a chronology apart from that of literary dictionaries" (p. 194).

- On how a modern-day Gulliver would view the reading habits of contemporary humans: "What would he see? He would see huge commercial temples in which books are sold in their thousands, immense edifices in which the published world is divided and arranged in tidy categories for the guided consumption of the faithful. He would see libraries with readers milling about in the stacks as they have done for centuries. He would see them exploring the virtual collections into which some of the books have been mutated, leading the fragile existence of electronic ghosts. Outside, too, the time-traveller would find a host of readers: on park benches, in the subway, on buses and trams and trains, in apartments and houses, everywhere. Our visitor could be excused if he supposed that ours was a literate society. On the contrary. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading - once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive - is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. As our visitor would eventually realize, in our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room" (p. 223). I'm not quite as sanguine as Manguel seems to be about the vibrancy of the biblio-universe, but I still found the quote fairly apt.

- Naturally there were points where I disagreed strongly with Manguel; most notably, he seems to have a soft spot for the Nicholson Bakers of the world, who don't seem to comprehend the limits of spatial and fiscal resources or the simple fact that some things (i.e. newspapers) just weren't meant to last forever in their original, highly-acidic form (p. 72-3).

- "Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. It may be that there is no book, however well written, that can remove an ounce of pain from the tragedy of Iraq or Rwanda, but it may also be that there is no book, however foully written, that does not allow an epiphany for its destined reader" (p. 232).

- "As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skill that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing. We have gone from one scale of values to the other many times, and will no doubt do so again. We can't be spared this erratic course, which seems to be an intrinsic part of our human nature, but we can at least sway with the knowledge of our swaying, and with the conviction that at one point or another our skill will once again be recognized as of the essence" (p. 232-3)..

- On not reading all the books in your library: "... a library, whatever its size, need not be read in its entirety to be useful; every reader profits from a fair balance between knowledge and ignorance, recall and oblivion" (p. 254).

- "Electronic text that requires no page can amicably accompany the page that requires no electricity; they need not exclude each other in an effort to serve us best" (p. 321-2).

As one of the preeminent contemporary writers on biblio-things, Manguel's views and musings are always welcome, even in the infrequent cases where I didn't share his position. His rich, delightful writing is a pleasure to read, and as with all of his other works, this one is well worth reading.

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Manguel's musings about libraries and related matters are, as is to be expected from this most genial and educated of writers, wide ranging and fascinating. I especially enjoyed the anecdotes and the stories about Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer who Manguel knew, and whom he seems most to resemble in his effortless erudition. I envy both Manguel's writing and his life--such as sitting at nighttime beneath the trees outside his French home discussing imaginary books and libraries with his friends. Could there be a better life? Still, when all is said and done, as enjoyable as this book is, it isn't quite in the same league as his A History of Reading, so I have withheld one star--and I'm already feeling guilty about it!

I love libraries, visit one weekly and, appropriately enough, I borrowed this book from my local library. In my youth my dream had been to own a large library with walled shelves along with comfortable chairs, low lighting, and reading tables. That hasn't quite worked out like I had hoped-my books are double-stacked on my shelves and sitting in piles on the floor! Alberto Manguel built his dream library out of the remains of an old stone barn and filled it with his many books. It sounds so beautiful and I am so very envious.

The book describes libraries of the past, and in many forms and settings. I found out that the famous Library at Alexandria did not burn down in one big conflagration, it more just withered away. He writes of secret show more libraries, historical libraries, national libraries, imagined libraries, book burnings (sadly they still happen, and here in the United States), and much more. We live in a society where books are being banned and librarians and teachers can be arrested for carrying or promoting certain books. Where the U.S government can flag library patrons for books that they take out. Funds are being dramatically cut to libraries. This is very sad and terrible. For many, libraries are the only source of books, study, and reading. Libraries are necessary for a free society. I think I need to re-read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451...

Manguel writes almost poetically in his descriptions, and this was a joy to read. Anyone who loves books and libraries (everyone in Goodreads?) will enjoy this. And use an "I read banned books" bookmark-I did!! show less

Librarians are really good at telling each other about how wonderful and essential libraries are. I don't mean that as a statement of judgement. I think our affinity for libraries and what can be found in them is more than justified, but that of course is what brought me to the program and to this book. Manguel affirms through this beautiful exegesis just how very magical libraries are--as place, as identity, as mind, as shadow. I read it through saying yes, yes that's why libraries matter, that's what they've done, that's what they've been, this is what they are and this is what the humans that felt the desire for them are.

I want to sneak into Manguel's library in France and live there (would he mind? would I find a colony of migrant show more librarians already there? I can't be the first to have thought of this). I was sorry to have missed his talk at the Library and Archives Canada by just a few days. He draws from a vast array of knowledge, gives you the impression he's pulled it from his shelves, coming across strongly like an Argentinian Eco. The book is, of course, rich with reference to other books which means my reading list will bulk up exponentially, especially if another of his books appears on it. show less