Monday, 05.12.08

Breathing Books

Photo by flickr user Unhindered by Talent under a creative commons license

Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night is published by Yale University Press.

Manguel, a Canadian of Argentine extraction, is best known for A Dictionary of Imaginary Places -- an extensive gazetteer of fiction, legend, and fantasy. His latest book, a wide-ranging rumination on libraries and their history, is concerned with real places, but his alchemical style and imagination make them sound like the stuff of fiction.

Reading deeply, even hermeneutically, into the life of books, Manguel distills his subject to lapidary anecdotes: The cataloguing methods of 10th-century China (the Chinese ordered works according to the authors' social rankings); a Mesopotamian dictionary inscribed with a warning to would-be thieves about the vengeance of Ishtar; the eccentric German collector Aby Warburg, who continually reorganized his library to reflect the composition of his mind. The most chilling and moving anecdote details the clandestine lending of forbidden books in the children’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Library at Night is a reminder of all the things that books -- real, physical, hefted books -- have represented. They are friends, memories, consolations, and gateways to thought. As objects, they carry history, and their decay is itself a lesson in mortality. We mourn with Manguel the destruction of Aztec civilization during the great book-burnings of Juan de Zumarraga's Mexican Inquisition, and we celebrate the survival of a Jewish prayer book he discovered in a Berlin market: "From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story." Their impermanence instructs us in the need to remember.

For bibliophiles, The Library at Night is a pleasure -- especially at this time of expansion, reinvention and internet-related uncertainty for libraries. For those like Manguel who are distressed by the amnesia of the Web, this book is also an excellent example of how to rejuvenate the past and continue its conversations.

— Ben Carlson