Alberto Manguel - The Library at Night - Part 1 of 2
7:20
The acclaimed writer on books and reading discusses his book 'The Library at Night' which presents a history of libraries past and present.
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Blackwell Podcasts
Alberto Manguel
The Library at Night
26th June 2009
www dot blackwell dot co dot uk
GEORGE MILLER: Hello and welcome to this download from Blackwell Online. My name is George Miller, and our guest today is Alberto Manguel, the Argentine-borne writer who now lives in rural France with his library of thirty five thousand books. He is the author of a history of reading, among many other titles, and the significance of reading remains a central preoccupation of his latest book, "The Library at Night." The book is a beautifully written and illustrated meditation on libraries past and present, real and virtual, and of their continuing but always evolving place in our culture. I began by asking Alberto why he had chosen to make libraries the specific focus of this book.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Over the past ten-fifteen years or so, I have been writing about books. I wrote a history of reading, I wrote a history of reading images, I wrote a reader's diary ... and the subject if, of course, endless.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Because it touches on every aspect of our society, but I thought that perhaps I hadn't looked in great detail at this repository of our memory, which is the library.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: And perhaps at the time when we're speaking of virtual libraries, and we're thinking that our memory can now be an electronic one, it might be good to look at these ancient traditional places and see how they work and whether they still have a function in our society.
GEORGE MILLER: Your own personal library is a reference point throughout the book, I wanted to ask you to describe that a little bit to me, because it sounds a marvelous place.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: My library is, in some sense, my autobiography. Not only because the books in it reflect my taste and my dislikes, but also because my library is an accumulation of libraries. Libraries that I started when I was a child--
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: And then kept setting up in the different places in which I've lived. Like everybody else, I've always lived in places that are too small for all the books I wanted to have.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: So I had to keep storing those books, eventually in Canada, and finally I was able to find this place here in France, large enough to hold the library. And so, in this old Presbytere ...
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: This manse, I was able to build a room that I thought might contain all my books, but of course, it doesn't.
[he laughs]
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Like every other library, it became too small--
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: For the books I wanted to keep in it.
GEORGE MILLER: And did you have a sense that your library, the one you presently have, was something you had aspired to? That you were sort of, your own ideal library that you had been reaching for throughout your book-collecting years?
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Very much so. I had in mind a special kind of library, I think that every reader finds that there are certain places that are more comfortable than others.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: And some, like, large spaces ... roomy libraries, um, very well lit. Others prefer a more intimate space.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: That some readers might find gloomy. I like the latter, I had in mind the library of my high school in Buenos Aires, which was--
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: A nineteenth-century library with green lamps over the desks that gave a very mellow light to the place.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: And I tried to reconstruct that. And then afterwards, I saw the Vita Sackville-West's house and the long hall in it, and the library finally ended up building as a combination of both Sackville-West's library and the one of my school.
GEORGE MILLER: You entitled the book "The Library at Night," and the different atmospheres of different times of day are clearly very important to you, and they color the experience of your reading.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Indeed. I think that every reader has the experience of reading a different book, even if it's the same book, because the time of day changes. During the day, the library has a visible order. The place in which we read has a structure that becomes apparent, and we're also more alert to the conventions of reading and of the space we're in. At night, the atmosphere changes. At night, the library becomes identified with the cones of light, the spaces of light. The clearings, as it were, in a forest.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: In which we find ourselves, and then ... without sounding mystical, I hope, I do find that themselves impose a different order to the library and speak to us in a different way. I find the rhythm of my reading changes at night.
GEORGE MILLER: Mmm ... Tell me about this concept of euthemia, because I hadn't come across that before, and I thought it was a very interesting idea.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: It is a lovely Greek word that implies contentment or satisfaction ... uh, peace of mind. All these things combined that the readers sometime find when they are alone with a book.
GEORGE MILLER: You described Machiavelli, that was quite a surprising quote. Machiavelli describing his state of mind when he casts off his work-a-day cares and is alone for four hours in his library. I thought that was a very telling insight.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Indeed, we expect Machiavelli to correspond to the image of the sly counselor that we usually have of him, but in fact he was a very great reader, and the state of mind in which he read was important to him.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: He did not want to bring the way in which he worked throughout the day into his library. He wanted the political care, the affairs of state left outside, so that he could establish a dalliance with his books that was entirely private. But that, of course, again is very much the way in which readers react to their libraries. And when I say libraries, I don't mean necessarily this huge space.
GEORGE MILLER: Yes.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: I have thirty five thousand books, but a library can consist of half a dozen books, of a hundred books. The number of books doesn't matter as much as our relationship to those books.
GEORGE MILLER: So far, listeners might get the impression that we're talking about libraries as a relatively affluent past time, but you're also interested in the social function, the educational function of libraries. And nowhere was that more tellingly brought home, I think, to me than the picture of a Colombian donkey library. Tell me what was going on there.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Colombia is a very difficult country, torn by war and ... civil war and conflicts between the drug dealers and the government and the different power lords in the country. People in Colombia are constantly under all sorts of threats, especially in the remote regions in the jungle or in the mountains. It is very difficult to get to a library, so the library goes to them. And in the same way as we have these bus libraries--
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: In many countries in Europe, in Colombia in order to go up into the Sierra, they use burros.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: They use donkeys that will carry book bags, and the book bags are left with an elder at the village or sometimes a teacher if there is a little school. And people will come and borrow those books, and then they will be exchanged after two-three months. A wonderful anecdote was told to me by one of these librarians ...
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Books were always returned, never stolen. Only once was a book not returned, and it happened to be Homer's "Iliad" translated into Spanish.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: And I thought that that was very curious.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: And I asked the librarian to tell me about it, and the librarian had asked the elder, and the elder said "We want to keep this book because it reflects exactly our situation."
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: "The gods are crazy, the war is crazy, we have to live in this constant conflict, and this book reflects not the story told thousands of years ago, but our own story today."
GEORGE MILLER: Now, if there's a shadow in the background, I suppose, throughout the whole book, it is the thought that libraries as we know them may in the not too distant future become obsolescent, and we know that already there are some universities where new departments are set up which have completely paper-free information technology centers. And I wondered how you personally felt about the shift which is happening towards electronic texts as opposed to paper texts.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Obsolescence is not the right word. Obsolescence means that it would have no further use.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: The library will always have a use in society, whether we choose to make use of that use is another matter. I think that the technology pushed by commercial reasons has tried to make us believe that the book of paper is no longer valuable, and that we should replace it all with a virtual library.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: We forget that every technology has its own value for a certain purpose. You use the electronic book, for instance, on certain occasion ... but by and large, a book of paper and an electronic text are very different things, and there's no reason why we should have to choose between one and the other. It is very important to remember that the memory of an electronic text is not the same as that of the book, and that our relationship to paper is not the same to that of the screen--
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Which can disappear, and has a fragility that we are not told about. We should also remember that those who speak of the death of paper ... Bill Gates, for instance.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Spoke of the death of paper in a book that he published on paper.
[he laughs]
GEORGE MILLER: And you quote the very telling example in the book of the Doomsday Book compared to a BBC project, which is just a few years old. Can you say a little bit about that?
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Indeed, the idea was to put the Doomsday Book and create a new Doomsday Book in electronic format. But because of advances in technology, once the book was finished, once the project was finished, it was realized that there was no instrument capable of reading that technology anymore. That is to say, because we constantly need new instruments to use the electronic support, it's a feature of the industry to create new instruments so that we need to buy new printers, new computers, and so on.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: On the other hand, the old Doomsday Book can still be read and can still be consulted.
GEORGE MILLER: At the back of the book, you have a list which you call a non-canonical list of favorite books, which runs to just, I suppose, maybe five or six pages. And I wondered, was it a process which was agonizing to go from thirty five thousand volumes to such a concise list?
ALBERTO MANGUEL: Of course it was, it's always impossible to choose those "desert island books" ...
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: In this case, I was given the possibility of choosing just about a hundred titles.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: So it was a little easier, but I suppose if I had made that selection two years earlier, or if I make that selection in another couple of years, the titles will change.
GEORGE MILLER: Mm hmm.
ALBERTO MANGUEL: We have favorite books for a certain time in our lives, and uh ... as that time changes, so do the titles.
---
From amazon.com:
The Library at Night
Alberto Manguel (Author)
Publication Date: April 28, 2009
Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. "Libraries," he says, "have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic." In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.
Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the "complete" libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought - the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral "memory libraries" kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written - Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel's mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.
---
From usatoday.com:
In his "foolhardy youth," Alberto Manguel confesses, "when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamed of becoming a librarian."
He didn't, blaming "sloth and an ill-restrained fondness for travel." Instead, he became an essayist, novelist and author of such ambitious works as A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading.
The Library at Night is a personal and intellectual account of the libraries in Manguel's life, or the ones he's merely read about or imagined. It's for readers who take books seriously. The writing is challenging but rewarding.
Manguel, who was raised in Argentina, moved to Canada and now lives in France, takes a global and historic view of libraries. He's intrigued by what he sees as the mysterious human desire to give order to the universe, despite all evidence that life is not all that ordered.
He notes that the diarist Samuel Pepys organized and shelved his 3,000 volumes behind glass according to their size. Manguel's own 30,000-volume library is shelved on more of a personal basis in his home, a renovated 15th-century barn in the hills south of the Loire.
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