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Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
New Haven (CT), Yale University Press
Description
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries. In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000�'volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading. In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader, the author illuminates the highly personal art of reading and affirms the vital role of public libraries. Manguel's musings range widely, from delightful reflections on the idiosyncrasies of book lovers to deeper analyses of historic and catastrophic book events, including the burning of ancient Alexandria's library and contemporary library lootings at the hands of ISIS. With insight and passion, the author underscores the universal centrality of books and their unique importance to a democratic, civilized, and engaged society.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member dono421846
Although this newest book by Manguel lacks some of the originality and sparkle of his earlier works, it serves as a reminder of the depth of erudition he controls.
The framing device for the short work is the need to pack his home in France (for reasons he refuses to discuss, which I found oddly
Manguel suggests that his age coupled with the fact that his library is packed and stored and no longer available for his consultation, as well as his new responsibilities as head of the Argentine national library (a post once held by his mentor, Jorge Borges), he may have reached the end of his writing career. That would indeed be a shame.
The framing device for the short work is the need to pack his home in France (for reasons he refuses to discuss, which I found oddly
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frustrating and even a bit hypocritical coming from someone who has spent his entire life consuming the revelatory writings of others), including the library in the rebuilt country barn. This project initiates a series of ruminations and digressions on various topics focusing on what it means to pack a library. Each section is individually interesting, but I found the ten digressions disruptive of flow of the central narrative. Manguel suggests that his age coupled with the fact that his library is packed and stored and no longer available for his consultation, as well as his new responsibilities as head of the Argentine national library (a post once held by his mentor, Jorge Borges), he may have reached the end of his writing career. That would indeed be a shame.
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LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
Manguel had to move from a farm in France where his 35,000 volume library was housed in a separate building to a one bedroom apartment in NYC. In this book, he muses on his library and other book-related matters. However, he didn't have to dispose of any of his books--he just packed them all away
There were lots of good book quotes in this book, but I didn't really connect with most of the book. I found the focus more on the digressions than the books.
2 1/2 stars
Here is one quote I liked:
"In the days of my youth for those of us who liked to read, the dictionary was a magical object of mysterious powers. In the first place, because we were told that here, in this small fat volume, was almost the entirety of our common language, that between the drab covers were all the words that named everything in the world that we knew and also everything in the world that we did not know, that the dictionary held the past (all those words spoken by our grandparents and great-grandparents, mumbled in the dark, which we no longer used) and the future (words to name what we might one day want to say when a new experience would call for them)."
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carefully wrapped in tissue paper. So no hard decisions, although he won't have handy access to all his books.There were lots of good book quotes in this book, but I didn't really connect with most of the book. I found the focus more on the digressions than the books.
2 1/2 stars
Here is one quote I liked:
"In the days of my youth for those of us who liked to read, the dictionary was a magical object of mysterious powers. In the first place, because we were told that here, in this small fat volume, was almost the entirety of our common language, that between the drab covers were all the words that named everything in the world that we knew and also everything in the world that we did not know, that the dictionary held the past (all those words spoken by our grandparents and great-grandparents, mumbled in the dark, which we no longer used) and the future (words to name what we might one day want to say when a new experience would call for them)."
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LibraryThing member JBD1
A typically Manguelian ramble through thoughts on libraries and books and their meanings to each of us. Nice for a quiet Sunday afternoon's read.
LibraryThing member CarltonC
A short book of enjoyable literary digressions around Manguel’s thoughts on moving from France, where he had lived and built up a 35,000 volume personal library over about fifteen years. The book includes short segments of memoir, much literary history of books and libraries, and an attempt at an
If you have enjoyed Manguel’s other books about books, then there is more bookish pleasure here, but it is a slight volume and readers would be better starting with a book such as his excellent A History of Reading.
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overarching argument about the importance of libraries to society.If you have enjoyed Manguel’s other books about books, then there is more bookish pleasure here, but it is a slight volume and readers would be better starting with a book such as his excellent A History of Reading.
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LibraryThing member bell7
In a series interconnected essays and ten digressions, reader and writer Alberto Manguel ruminates on books and reading when he packed up a 16,000 volume library in France and moved, putting them in storage.
Manguel and I have almost nothing in common on the service - he is of a different
Manguel and I have almost nothing in common on the service - he is of a different
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generation, a gay man, Argentinian but the son of a diplomat and extremely well-traveled and well-read. But I absolutely love reading his essays. I connect to his love for reading and books, even when we haven't read the same stories, because it's a source of pleasure and comfort to us both. My library is about 4% the size of his, but his thoughts on the feelings that boxing up - and then unboxing as you move to another stage in life - his library entails is one I could strongly relate to. Reading this was an absolute pleasure. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
A short set of meditations on the relationship between humans and books, starting out from Manguel's personal reaction to having to put his private library (35k books) into storage due to the sale of his house in France, and winding up with the more public dilemma of being put in charge of
Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my library", which gave Manguel his title, talks about the way the books we own have meaning as physical objects, carrying memories of the circumstances in which we acquired them or the people who owned them before us, something Manguel also feels quite strongly (can another copy of Don Quijote ever be the same as my copy?), but going beyond that he is also fascinated by the way books gain meaning from the decisions we take on how to shelve them and the sometimes unexpected company they find themselves in as a result. But he's soon off far beyond that, talking about the way books relate to reality, imagination and dreams, about religious ideas of the power of words and images, about books versus political oppression, about golems, Dante, Humpty-Dumpty, Jules Verne, Borges, and much else.
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Argentina's National Library ("about 3-5 million books") and having to come up with a coherent formulation for the role of a national library in 21st century civic life. Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my library", which gave Manguel his title, talks about the way the books we own have meaning as physical objects, carrying memories of the circumstances in which we acquired them or the people who owned them before us, something Manguel also feels quite strongly (can another copy of Don Quijote ever be the same as my copy?), but going beyond that he is also fascinated by the way books gain meaning from the decisions we take on how to shelve them and the sometimes unexpected company they find themselves in as a result. But he's soon off far beyond that, talking about the way books relate to reality, imagination and dreams, about religious ideas of the power of words and images, about books versus political oppression, about golems, Dante, Humpty-Dumpty, Jules Verne, Borges, and much else.
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LibraryThing member jwhenderson
The musings of a literary friend, a wanderer in the world of books and literature. I have seldom read a book that expresses the love of reading better than those by Alberto Manguel.
LibraryThing member booktsunami
I loved this very personal, quirky, little book. It describes the authors emotions and feelings as he packs up his library after being forced to move from France where he and his partner had lived for many years and where he had built up and loved his library of some 35,000 books. That is a decent
"I can work happily only in my own private library, with my own books—or, rather, with the books I know to be mine". [In contrast with woking happily in public libraries which he apparently enjoys also].
And this I found to be so true: "Because a library is a place of memory, as [Walter] Benjamin noted, the unpacking of one's books quickly becomes a mnemonic ritual. "Not thoughts," Benjamin writes, "but images, memories," are conjured in the process. Memories of the cities in which he found his treasures, memories of the auction rooms in which he bought several of them, memories of the past rooms in which his books were kept." I have found that my library is like a physical extension of my mind and memory. I used to be able to go to my shelves (when they were more limited and better organised) and find a tome where I vaguely remembered some words or phrase from long ago. In fact, I won a competition of this sort ("Who wrote this?") at the Australian National University may years ago by being able to find some words of Malcolm Muggeridge that I had read long before. But Google search soon put a stop to that sort of activity.
A century ago, Thomas Carlyle described the writer in these words: "He, with his copy-rights and his copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living." I have also treasured the words, attributed to Carlyle, that "Knowledge is of two forms: either you know something or you know where you can find out about it"....and my library, for me, has been where I can find out about it.
He woke up one morning thinking about Kafka (and had three shelves devoted to Kafka): ........"I no longer have Kafka's books at hand, but in a notebook I carry around I jotted down certain lines from his correspondence, such as this one: "We read to ask questions." Indeed. Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding. They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page".
And, after he has packed he reflects on the organisation of his collection: "What quirk made me cluster these volumes into something like the colored countries on my globe? What brought on these associations that seemed to owe their meaning to faded emotions and a logic whose rules I can now no longer remember? And does my present self-reflect that distant haunting? Because if every library is autobiographical, its packing up seems to have something of a self-obituary. Perhaps these questions are the true subject of this elegy.
There are certain readers for whom books exist in the moment of reading them, and later as memories of the read pages, but who feel that the physical incarnations of books are dispensable. Borges, for instance, was one of these. Those who never visited Borges's modest flat imagined his library to be as vast as that of Babel. In fact, Borges kept only a few hundred books, and even these he used to give away as gifts to visitors".....But it seems to me that Alberto Manguel is not like Borges ....he needs the books as an extension of his mind.
I've captured, below, a few extracts from his "elegy" that resonated with me for various reasons.
"The comforting objects on my own night table are (have always been) books, and my library was itself a place of comfort and quiet reassurance. It may be that books have this reassuring quality because we don't really possess them: books possess us".
"Even though history has taught us that nothing lasts for long, the impulse to create in the face of impending destruction, to resettle in foreign lands and reproduce ancestral models, to build new libraries is a powerful and unquenchable impulse".
"Translators, perhaps more than any other word-smiths, know this: whatever we build out of words can never seize in its entirety the desired object. The Word that is in the beginning names but can never be named".
"The Word that breathes life (both Borges and Dante realized) is not equivalent to the living creature who breathes the word: the word that remains on the page, the word that, while imitating life, is incapable of being life. Plato made Socrates decry the creations of artists and poets for that very reason: art is imitation, never the real thing".
""Since life is a voyage or a battle," remarked Raymond Queneau, "every story is either the Iliad or the Odyssey." Are we incapable of conceiving of an entirely new story or do we recognize in every story traces of our previous readings? Does the fact that Adventures of Pinocchio seems to me like a rewriting of Adventures of Telemachus (both tell the story of a boy in search of his father)".
"The ancients weren't troubled by originality. The stories Homer told were long familiar to his listeners, and Dante could count on his audience knowing (all too well) of the sins punished in hell and the gossip about Paolo and Francesca".
"After having said good-bye to the house in which I had lived for so long and packed my books, not knowing when I would see them again, I was moved by the sight of the reconstructed bookshelves, the stone walls, the small windows streaked with gusts of rain as if by the apparition of the ghost of a dear dead friend. I felt that the library I had lost had been transformed into a different one, the now shared symbol of something that I could only vaguely understand but knew to be real". {I feel his sadness].
"One day in 1842, the thirty-eight-year-old [Nathaniel] Hawthorne wrote, "To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness-with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.".....[What a revelation...these words came back to me just a few days ago when I awoke suddenly...and thus remembered clearly the last lazy fusion of events from by dream..clear enough to recognise the origins of most but the strange blending of different themes and ideas was almost hallucinogenic].
"No doubt the writer's task is to embrace Humpty Dumpty's faith in the powers of language, and be the master, while at the same time convincing Alice that he submits to the rules of a shared understanding, rules over which the words themselves hold dominion".
On Language: "Each particular language provokes or allows a certain way of thinking, elicits certain specific thoughts that come to our mind not only through but because of the language we call ours. Every translator knows that passing from one language to another is less an act of reconstruction than one of reconversion, in the profoundest sense of changing one's system of belief. No French author would ever come up with "être ou ne pas être" for "To be or not to be" any more than an English author would write
"For a long time I went to bed early" for "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure." Their language, not their experience, disallows it".
And a little bit of personal information about his youth: "Because my father was in the diplomatic service, when I was a few months old I was taken to his first posting and didn't return until I was seven. I did my schooling in Buenos Aires, and left again in 1969 as a twenty-one-year-old eager to travel. I returned on a number of occasions, but I never lived in Argentina again. In 2014, after my partner and I left France, we settled in New York. Now I was asked to leave everything once more and return to Buenos Aires. After much hesitation, I accepted".
"In a literary twist that Henry James might have enjoyed, the man responsible for the destruction of many of the earliest documents of the Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations was responsible as well for establishing, in 1539, the first printing press in all the Americas. The earliest productions of the press included a book by Zumárraga himself, Brief Doctrine of the Christian Faith, but also a Latin edition of the Dialectics of Aristotle and a handbook of Mexican (native) grammar by Alonso de Molina. Books are often wiser and more generous than their makers".
But a lovely, thoughtful little book that I have taken to heart and I'm pleased that his book collection has since been unpacked in Canada and made into some sort of public monument....I assume that it has become a public library ...and what more could Manguel hope for really. I'm in the throes of downsizing my library and donating most to charity. All rather sad. But five stars to Manguel for capturing in words what it means to a bibliophile to have to "pack up" their library.
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collection....it would put him at about No. 40 in terms of size with the personal libraries of current LibraryThing members. (I rate only a paltry No. 2,500). So he has been a serious collector and reader of books. If he's actually read them all it would mean that he'd been reading 500 books a year for every one of his 70 years....unlikely). But there are so many passages in the book that resonate with me: Viz "I can work happily only in my own private library, with my own books—or, rather, with the books I know to be mine". [In contrast with woking happily in public libraries which he apparently enjoys also].
And this I found to be so true: "Because a library is a place of memory, as [Walter] Benjamin noted, the unpacking of one's books quickly becomes a mnemonic ritual. "Not thoughts," Benjamin writes, "but images, memories," are conjured in the process. Memories of the cities in which he found his treasures, memories of the auction rooms in which he bought several of them, memories of the past rooms in which his books were kept." I have found that my library is like a physical extension of my mind and memory. I used to be able to go to my shelves (when they were more limited and better organised) and find a tome where I vaguely remembered some words or phrase from long ago. In fact, I won a competition of this sort ("Who wrote this?") at the Australian National University may years ago by being able to find some words of Malcolm Muggeridge that I had read long before. But Google search soon put a stop to that sort of activity.
A century ago, Thomas Carlyle described the writer in these words: "He, with his copy-rights and his copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living." I have also treasured the words, attributed to Carlyle, that "Knowledge is of two forms: either you know something or you know where you can find out about it"....and my library, for me, has been where I can find out about it.
He woke up one morning thinking about Kafka (and had three shelves devoted to Kafka): ........"I no longer have Kafka's books at hand, but in a notebook I carry around I jotted down certain lines from his correspondence, such as this one: "We read to ask questions." Indeed. Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding. They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page".
And, after he has packed he reflects on the organisation of his collection: "What quirk made me cluster these volumes into something like the colored countries on my globe? What brought on these associations that seemed to owe their meaning to faded emotions and a logic whose rules I can now no longer remember? And does my present self-reflect that distant haunting? Because if every library is autobiographical, its packing up seems to have something of a self-obituary. Perhaps these questions are the true subject of this elegy.
There are certain readers for whom books exist in the moment of reading them, and later as memories of the read pages, but who feel that the physical incarnations of books are dispensable. Borges, for instance, was one of these. Those who never visited Borges's modest flat imagined his library to be as vast as that of Babel. In fact, Borges kept only a few hundred books, and even these he used to give away as gifts to visitors".....But it seems to me that Alberto Manguel is not like Borges ....he needs the books as an extension of his mind.
I've captured, below, a few extracts from his "elegy" that resonated with me for various reasons.
"The comforting objects on my own night table are (have always been) books, and my library was itself a place of comfort and quiet reassurance. It may be that books have this reassuring quality because we don't really possess them: books possess us".
"Even though history has taught us that nothing lasts for long, the impulse to create in the face of impending destruction, to resettle in foreign lands and reproduce ancestral models, to build new libraries is a powerful and unquenchable impulse".
"Translators, perhaps more than any other word-smiths, know this: whatever we build out of words can never seize in its entirety the desired object. The Word that is in the beginning names but can never be named".
"The Word that breathes life (both Borges and Dante realized) is not equivalent to the living creature who breathes the word: the word that remains on the page, the word that, while imitating life, is incapable of being life. Plato made Socrates decry the creations of artists and poets for that very reason: art is imitation, never the real thing".
""Since life is a voyage or a battle," remarked Raymond Queneau, "every story is either the Iliad or the Odyssey." Are we incapable of conceiving of an entirely new story or do we recognize in every story traces of our previous readings? Does the fact that Adventures of Pinocchio seems to me like a rewriting of Adventures of Telemachus (both tell the story of a boy in search of his father)".
"The ancients weren't troubled by originality. The stories Homer told were long familiar to his listeners, and Dante could count on his audience knowing (all too well) of the sins punished in hell and the gossip about Paolo and Francesca".
"After having said good-bye to the house in which I had lived for so long and packed my books, not knowing when I would see them again, I was moved by the sight of the reconstructed bookshelves, the stone walls, the small windows streaked with gusts of rain as if by the apparition of the ghost of a dear dead friend. I felt that the library I had lost had been transformed into a different one, the now shared symbol of something that I could only vaguely understand but knew to be real". {I feel his sadness].
"One day in 1842, the thirty-eight-year-old [Nathaniel] Hawthorne wrote, "To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness-with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.".....[What a revelation...these words came back to me just a few days ago when I awoke suddenly...and thus remembered clearly the last lazy fusion of events from by dream..clear enough to recognise the origins of most but the strange blending of different themes and ideas was almost hallucinogenic].
"No doubt the writer's task is to embrace Humpty Dumpty's faith in the powers of language, and be the master, while at the same time convincing Alice that he submits to the rules of a shared understanding, rules over which the words themselves hold dominion".
On Language: "Each particular language provokes or allows a certain way of thinking, elicits certain specific thoughts that come to our mind not only through but because of the language we call ours. Every translator knows that passing from one language to another is less an act of reconstruction than one of reconversion, in the profoundest sense of changing one's system of belief. No French author would ever come up with "être ou ne pas être" for "To be or not to be" any more than an English author would write
"For a long time I went to bed early" for "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure." Their language, not their experience, disallows it".
And a little bit of personal information about his youth: "Because my father was in the diplomatic service, when I was a few months old I was taken to his first posting and didn't return until I was seven. I did my schooling in Buenos Aires, and left again in 1969 as a twenty-one-year-old eager to travel. I returned on a number of occasions, but I never lived in Argentina again. In 2014, after my partner and I left France, we settled in New York. Now I was asked to leave everything once more and return to Buenos Aires. After much hesitation, I accepted".
"In a literary twist that Henry James might have enjoyed, the man responsible for the destruction of many of the earliest documents of the Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations was responsible as well for establishing, in 1539, the first printing press in all the Americas. The earliest productions of the press included a book by Zumárraga himself, Brief Doctrine of the Christian Faith, but also a Latin edition of the Dialectics of Aristotle and a handbook of Mexican (native) grammar by Alonso de Molina. Books are often wiser and more generous than their makers".
But a lovely, thoughtful little book that I have taken to heart and I'm pleased that his book collection has since been unpacked in Canada and made into some sort of public monument....I assume that it has become a public library ...and what more could Manguel hope for really. I'm in the throes of downsizing my library and donating most to charity. All rather sad. But five stars to Manguel for capturing in words what it means to a bibliophile to have to "pack up" their library.
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Awards
NPR: Books We Love (2018)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2017
ISBN
9780300219333