The Constant Reader

Collected wisdom: Libraries such as this one are vital to our public life, argues writer Alberto Manguel. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

If you’re the type who scans people’s bookshelves for clues to their taste, Alberto Manguel’s library presents a challenge.

“I don’t give books away or throw them out. Any book that comes into my library has come in for some reason, and stays there,” says the prolific writer, translator and anthologist during a recent interview in Toronto. He’s currently on a North American tour to promote his latest book, The Library at Night. In half a century of collecting, Manguel has amassed more than 35,000 books — and discarded just one.

The sole outcast? Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

“I felt it was infecting the atmosphere,” Manguel explains.

The atmosphere in The Library at Night is cultivated, but never stodgy. It’s the ideal companion volume to his international bestseller A History of Reading (1996), winner of France’s prestigious Prix Médicis. Manguel calls his musings on the library, both as public institution and private sanctuary, “an account of astonishment.” It has the same cosmopolitan outlook and affable tone as A History of Reading, and takes a similarly relaxed, anecdotal stroll through fascinating historical detail and an eclectic array of sources, from ancient scholars like Callimachus to contemporary luminaries like Margaret Atwood.

Alberto Manguel. (Random House Canada)

After two decades in Toronto, in 2002, the Argentinian-born Manguel moved to a 15th-century farmhouse in France’s Loire Valley, where he rebuilt a ruined barn to house his books. The task of unpacking and organizing his collection sparked reflections on the role of libraries as storehouses of memory and imagination.

“Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theatres,” the American aphorist Mason Cooley once wrote. Manguel turns the library, both public and private, into a theatre rich in symbolism and associations. The basic question of how books should be organized is tied to metaphysics: how do we find (or create) meaning in a chaotic universe? (While the Dewey Decimal System is today’s gold standard, Manguel describes an ancient Chinese classification that bundled everything into just four categories: “classical texts, works of history, philosophical work, and miscellaneous literary works.”)

In a chapter entitled “The Library as Oblivion,” Manguel shifts seamlessly from books whose contents he’s forgotten or only recalls in fragments to considering the wider cultural loss of texts that have disappeared. Elsewhere, in “The Library as Shadow,” the issue of what books to include/exclude becomes a reminder of realpolitik. Though the library has historically symbolized intellectual freedom, as an institution, it’s also served as cultural gatekeeper. As Manguel puts it, with characteristic gracefulness, “Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadowy library of absences.”

The spectral presence haunting the book itself is the internet, which Manguel describes as “the phantom electronic library.” His image of the ideal library is staunchly traditional: shelves and shelves of books, comfortable chairs, congenial lighting. The reverent hush is almost palpable. But the net has changed our reliance on ink-and-paper references and the nature of the public library itself. Card catalogues have gone the way of parchment scrolls, while books share shelf space with CDs and DVDs.

Manguel describes himself as a “moderate skeptic” when it comes to the internet. He seems to regard it as a tantalizing diversion rather than an outright threat — like snacking on an energy bar instead of eating a proper meal. He cites its value in making texts available online that may otherwise be difficult to access, and acknowledges that its speed and multiplicity are alluring. But his preference is unhurried contemplation. To him, “reading often requires slowness, depth and context,” which skimming Web pages doesn’t provide.

As we become an increasingly online culture, electronic media are grabbing a bigger share of the public library’s scarce resources, a trend U.S. novelist Nicholson Baker attacked in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001). In The Library at Night, Manguel takes the sharp edges off Baker’s tone of outrage, but passionately echoes his concerns about junking valuable archives of newspapers and books in favour of electronic data storage.

(Random House Canada)

“What worries me the most is that the impulse behind the replacement of paper-and-ink collections by a virtual collection is not an intellectual or even scientific impulse,” he says. “It is a purely material one that benefits the creators of the electronic media, who are making a fortune by inventing for us a fear of the fragility of paper, and laying no stress on the fragility of the electronic media. We don’t know how long memory sticks or CDs will last. We do know that books last for thousands of years.”

In The Library at Night, Manguel reminds us how much treasure there is to be found in the pages of those age-old books. He’s like a literary magpie, seizing on the glitter of a brilliant quote here, the shiny kernel of a historical anecdote there. There’s the Assyrian king who believed that the size of his library was a reflection of his power; the cataloguer at France’s Bibliothèque Nationale who added “the titles of extremely interesting works that should have been written” to that venerable library’s list of collections; and the Danish scholar charged with recovering the pages of ancient manuscripts that impoverished 18th-century Icelanders had stolen to line their clothing in a bitterly cold winter.

Manguel himself doesn’t regard books as sacred objects per se. “They’re there to be read and written in, and used,” he says. “I am not the kind of collector who buys a book and puts it in a plastic bag so that it won’t be opened, and its pristine condition will be preserved.”

He holds greater regard for the imaginative act of reading itself. “A text in a closed book has no factual existence until you open the book and breathe life into it,” he says. “The power that the reader has to not only lend life to the text but also to decide what the text is, and which of the many texts will survive, is extraordinary.”

“The fact that I write books feels to me as a consequence of my reading,” Manguel says. “If someone said I could never write again, I would be far less sad than if someone said I couldn’t read again.”

The Library at Night is published by Knopf and is in bookstores now.

Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer and editor.

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