The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

I read this book just over a year and a half ago, so I wasn’t exactly digging up an old memory or trying to remember why I felt the way I did about it. I was re-reading it out of pure indulgence. I knew I loved this book and I knew why. And I knew I wanted to read it again.

Actually, I found myself at my local library, looking for something to read at a nearby park where I was planning to lounge, and trying not to succumb to the overwhelming Distraction of shelves upon shelves of books. I could check out The Library at Night again and read it again and it would fit into my reading plans just fine. Plus, it was particularly fun to read about libraries, some of them completely mad, while I was also reading The Name of the Rose.

I still adore the style, the quality and the premise of this book. It’s part history, part social and psychological commentary, part memoir, and it’s all about the places people have kept and read their books. Each person or group who collected volumes together in one place, whether to make them easily accessible to more readers or to protect and preserve them, must have first found books and writing valuable. The chronicle and celebration of that philosophy is skillfully done by Manguel in these relatively few pages that house so much information.

The Library at Night was published in 2006 when the internet had found a firm foothold but e-books and e-readers were just coming along. Manguel expresses some contempt for the internet and seems skeptical that digital archives would be an effective tool in preserving the written word. I admit to being among the many who didn’t think I could make the move to reading a screen rather than curling up with a paper book, but I also must admit that the quality of my experience with my e-reader has me coming around. This year, I read The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King and Cooked (Michael Pollan) on my e-reader before writing about them here. Other than requiring a bit of time to get used to using the digital bookmark and highlighting functions of my reader, I cannot say I really wished I could have been reading paper copies of these books instead.

E-reading may end up spelling the end of large, charming (and dusty and disorganized) shelves of books defining libraries. (Although, I suppose “collections” of antique books will always be of value.) Many things will definitely be lost if that is true, many things described in The Library at Night, but, as Manguel puts it in the chapter “The Library as Space,” “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.” I, who have moved my library back and forth across the country a few times, would argue that mass is an issue as well. My e-reader, along with its protective case that also functions as an easel, is approximately 9 ¾ inches (24.5 centimeters) by 6 ¾ in (17.25 cm) by 7/8 in (2.25 cm) and has a mass of about 1 ¾ pounds (810 g). With our e-book collections, we have the potential to take our libraries with us wherever we go.

 

 

Coming soon: The Uplift War by David Brin (finally!)

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before