The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

Every once in a while, I find a book that inspires me by making me wish I was as intelligent, well-read, knowledgeable and wise as the author. The Library at Night is one of those books. It is a history of and a tribute to public and private libraries and an exploration of the philosophies and practices of collecting, organizing, storing and reading books.

Since I’ve created this Web journal to help myself organize and get the most out of my own library as well as books outside my home that I “should have read by now,” it probably comes as no surprise that I was particularly enamored with this book. It is organized into chapters with titles like “The Library as Order,” “The Library as Space,” “The Library as Identity,” and so on, with each theme having histories, anecdotes and explanations of its own. It is so well and wisely written, that I wish I could memorize the whole thing, so I could quote it at will. (Since I can no longer even memorize my mobile phone number, this is not going to happen.)

There are stories here about Manguel’s own private library (in which he likes to linger at night) as well as the ancient library of Alexandria and other large and important repositories of books and writing. The Library at Night, however, is not just about libraries as buildings or rooms with books in them, but also about how they reflect their readers, how readers imagine them, how readers persist in preserving them, or in some cases destroying them, an how the hopeless cause of collecting and organizing all that has ever been put into words has been pursued throughout all of human history. This process has been exhausting, frustrating, brilliant, and a little bit mad. If you’re a book lover, however, it’s a whole lot delightful.

Anyone who loves books cannot read The Library at Night and avoid coming away with a new and even greater appreciation for libraries, books and reading. Compared to the scholars at Alexandria, who Manguel says, “never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be a source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process,” or the counsellors at the Birkenau Concentration Camp who had learned children’s books by heart and would recite them to help give the children some hope, I do not seem like a very noble collector of books. If, however, I am so bold as to call my dusty, half-neglected jumble of books and my growing collection of e-books a “library,” and treat it with the respect I believe it deserves, perhaps I can be humbly counted among my betters.


Coming soon: The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now