The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
My rating: 5/5 cats
hey, what did you guys do on your friday night? get drunk? get laid? spend a quiet evening with friends? see a fillum??
me? oh, i just sat at home, nursing a sore back with painkillers, and decided to let my thoughts about Cloud Atlas percolate a little before writing a review for it, and decided to play a little booknerd game with myself. as part of my new year’s resolution to finally get around to reviewing all the books on my “favorites” shelf, i scrolled through all of ’em until i came to the first “naked” one.
and here we are.
sad, right?
NO! IT IS WONDERFUL! ENVY ME MY FRIDAY NIGHTS!
this book is a must-have for booknerds. along with that Nicholas Basbanes book, it will get you well on your way to having the best book collection about books. like the one i have.
manguel approaches the concept of the library from all angles: the personal library, the library as institution, the architecture of the library, libraries lost to burning or time, “imaginary” libraries. and all told in this wonderfully anecdotal way that feels so familiar to anyone who appreciates books-as-objects.
i wrote a really long review of this earlier and accidentally deleted it (i blame the painkillers, truly) so i am going to let this book speak for itself.
We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical hierarchy of exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost. Every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences.
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I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
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Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space. It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty 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. This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library’s borders coincide with those of the world itself. In my adolescence, I remember watching with a kind of fascinated horror, how night after night the shelves on the wall of my room would fill up, apparently on their own, until no promissory nooks were left. New books, lying flat as in the earliest codex libraries, would begin to pile up one on top of the other. Old books, occupying their measured place during the day, would double and quadruple in volume and keep any newcomers at bay. All around me – on the floor, in the corners, under the bed, on my desk – columns of books would slowly rise and transform the space into a saprophyte forest, its sprouting trunks threatening to crowd me out.Later, in my home in Toronto, I put up bookshelves just about everywhere – in bedrooms and kitchen, corridors and bathroom. Even the covered porch had its shelves, so that my children complained that they felt they required a library card to enter their own home.
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i was going to type out the rest of that paragraph, but it was so peppered with diacritical marks that my un-computer-savvy self balked. but know that it is adorable. and this gives you incentive to seek it out for yourself.
this book needs to be read.
read it.
i am going to, again.
but now i am going to run away before i accidentally delete this one, too. new year’s resolution – i am on my way to you!
