Logic of the Labyrinth

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The New York Sun

Few places are spookier a big library at night. The rows of shelves hold a swarm of shadows of all shapes and sizes. There are mysterious creaks and rustlings. The books stand in their dark ranks, their spines touched by occasional gleams from some distant window. The silence is unnerving. It’s a silence that feels charged with all the dreams and hopes and dreads that the books in their ordered multitudes contain. Still, add a shaded reading lamp, a comfortable armchair, and a footstool, and the library turns into the cosiest and most welcoming of nighttime spaces. It takes little more than the pooled circle of soft light cast by the lamp to banish, or to welcome, the ghosts lurking in the miles of stacks.

In “The Library at Night” (Yale University Press, 384 pages, $27.50), Alberto Manguel, the well-known historian of books and reading, lovingly explores the nooks and crannies of this enchanted domain. To call Mr. Manguel a “bookman” would be the grossest of understatements. He lives and breathes books. The touch of a page thrills him; the scent of printer’s ink intoxicates him. Though he’s not opposed in principle to electronic books or so-called “virtual libraries,” he’s cautious of the claims made for them, and no doubt rightly so. For him such devices, however useful, have none of the palpable magic of the printed word.

Mr. Manguel frames his forays into the world of the library, ancient and modern, real as well as imagined, with an account of his own rather stupendous personal library. A native of Buenos Aires who lived for many years in Canada, he has for the past eight years housed his collection of more than 30,000 volumes in a painstakingly renovated hilltop barn in France. At each stage he faces perplexing problems, and his resolution of them leads him into consideration of wider issues, all of which illustrate the “labyrinthine logic” of libraries. At first, he wants all of his books to be shelved within easy reach; when this proves impractical and he must build his shelves from baseboard to ceiling, he discusses the solutions other bibliophiles have entertained, some of them quite fantastic. The poet Lionel Johnson, for example, “was so pressed for room that he devised shelves suspended from the ceiling, like chandeliers.” In the Althorp library, in Northampton, the Earl Spencer constructed a towering mahogany ladder on wheels that sported a crow’s nest at the top where he could read in peace. (The book is beautifully illustrated, and there’s a particularly imposing reproduction of this eccentric contraption, which looks more like a siege machine than a library ladder.)

Mr. Manguel calls libraries “pleasantly mad places,” and here he shows us just how mad they can be. In 15 engaging chapters, he surveys libraries from antiquity to the present under various guises. There is the library as “myth” or as “order” personified, but also as “island,” as “survival,” even as “oblivion,” and — perhaps most fittingly — as “home.” In exploring these he draws on an astonishing range of references. There is, of course, Jorge Luis Borges, whom he knew in Buenos Aires (and has written about movingly in his “With Borges” of 2006), but also Chinese and Babylonian texts, Spanish poets, the Bible, obscure chroniclers, scientists, and architects. There seems to be nothing Mr. Manguel has not read; he even quotes from little-known medieval Arab authors, for whom the book was a sacred thing. If at times he seems indiscriminate, darting from such giants as Montaigne or Rabelais to forgotten rhymesters and even minor Canadian novelists, that is a function of his enormous enthusiasm.

For all his love of books, and the libraries which contain them, Mr. Manguel is never narrowly bookish. Books lead him continually back into life. His history presents brilliant vignettes of any number of formidable figures, from Melvil Dewey of the ingenious “Dewey Decimal System” and Sir Antonio Panizzi, designer of the great British Library with its fabulous domed reading room, to the shy, scholarly art historian Aby Warburg, whose magnificent library in Hamburg was dedicated to Mnemosyne, mother of the muses and goddess of memory. Mr. Manguel’s account of the transfer of the Warburg Library in 1933, after its founder’s death, from Hitler’s Germany to London, where it still flourishes, is especially gripping. Others weren’t so fortunate; in his chapter on the library as “survival,” Mr. Manguel includes a sketch of the library of the Theresienstadt ghetto made by Alfred Bergel, a prisoner, in 1943. The ordered rows of books, the tidy catalogs and neat inkstands, suggest that a library even in the midst of horror could still appear as what one librarian termed “a haven of peace.”

The great Spanish poet Francisco Quevedo once wrote that in a library, “I listen with my eyes to the dead.” His eyes “listened” to the wisdom of the past. Mr. Manguel doesn’t quote the line, and that’s probably deliberate: For him the library represents more than a cherished past. He calls it a “realm of chance,” where all voices, the mighty as well as the meek, strangely coincide. And it is at night, in the privileged circle of the lamp, that they are best heard.


The New York Sun

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