The Library at Night

"This is by a wonderful writer called Alberto Manguel. He’s Argentinian but has lived both in France and in Canada for much of his life. He now lives in Portugal. For a time, he was the national librarian of Argentina, the successor to Jorge Luis Borges who was his great hero. This is someone who is a great writer and a great teacher, who has also been both a professional librarian, running the national library of the country of his birth, but also a serious book collector. He’s not a collector of fine or rare books, particularly, but a collector of books to read. I think his private library is now 30,000 books or something like that. I’ve got some way to go before I get there! His collection has now been acquired by the Portuguese government as a center for writing, literacy and the appreciation of books and texts. They’re building a special building to house it in and­—full disclosure—I’m one of the advisors for him on this project. But I really would recommend the book. It’s not a textbook, it’s not a history, although it does cover a lot of history. It’s a series of meditations, really, on libraries. He’s somebody who, in his private library, when it was in their home in France, would get up in the middle of the night and just wander in and pull books from the shelves and read them because he couldn’t sleep. It’s a series of encounters with books, both books as artifacts, and as time travel. It’s a meditation on libraries, both institutional and private, and what it means to collect books, whether you’re Aby Warburg, or Hans Sloane—whose collection was the foundation of the British Museum Library (now the British Library)—or one of the librarians in Tabriz or Baghdad before it was destroyed by the Mongols. It’s a book which you can dip into, you don’t need to read it from cover to cover. It’s got an index. It’s a book which gives enormous pleasure but also insight into the motivations for collecting books, organizing them into bodies of knowledge, and all that those tasks entail. Ultimately, it’s about the pleasure of doing that, the pleasure of owning books, the pleasure of collecting them, of organizing them. He’s also written another book called Packing My Library . Yes, because he had to move his library several times. It’s a nice coda to The Library at Night. That’s a good question. My next book is going to be about librarians. I’m accumulating notes of various people who were librarians who we think of in other ways, like Casanova, for example. Or Mao Zedong: the Communist Party in China was founded by his boss, Li Dazhao, who was the director of the Peking University Library where Mao worked. Leibniz was a librarian, who wrote an important treatise on archival theory. David Hume was the librarian of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh in the 18th century. There are great associations between writers or intellectuals and libraries, but very few of them write about their libraries. Leibniz’s work on archival theory is not quite what I mean here, very few of them write about what it’s like to be a librarian or what it means to be a librarian, and perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to Alberto’s book."