"Visitors often ask if I've read all my books;my usual answer is that I've certainly opened every one of...

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	• The Library at Night Alberto Manguel Yale University Press, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent

For those who enjoy reading and perhaps a bibliophile or two, I found this book to be a very pleasant accounting of Manguel's love of books. It caused me to think about the reasons I appreciate books and enjoy those that are well written. Highly recommended.

"A big library really has the gift of tongues and vast potencies of telepathic communication"

Alberto Manguel starts this wonderful book quoting Northrop Frye. Manguel is a prolific writer who returns time and again to the joys of reading: A History of Reading, With Borges, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books, and this most recent triumph.

When he was seven Manguel assembled "a minuscule Alexandria, about one hundred volumes of different formats on all sorts of subjects." In Toronto he filled bedrooms, the kitchen, corridors and the bathroom with books -- his kids needed a library card to go home. In his dream library "books have no title and boast no author, forming a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge ... a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course." He lives with 30,000 books and reads in his library at night "when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence."

Manguel analyzes the library as Order, Power, Chance, Mind, Imagination, Identity and Home, and others. He describes the library of Alexandria, the personal libraries of Montaigne, Rabelais, Borges and Hitler. "In the spring of 1945, a group of American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division discovered, hidden in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, the remains of the library of Adolf Hitler, haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them." Manguel believes Hitler had 16,000 volumes, ranging from military history to spirituality, popular fiction and a few classics.

Manguel is critical of the Web: "The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travelers with the temptation of discovery." He points out that it delivers ephemera; 70% of its communications are destroyed after four months. "On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image."

Nonetheless he remembers reading for Jorge Luis Borges when he was a student. In "The Library of Babel" Borges predicted the Kindle: in a footnote Manguel that Borges wrote that the whole library, which includes every text in the world, could be reduced to one handheld book of infinitely thin pages.

The Borges note is only one of many many pleasures here. This book is playful, scholarly and erudite and a great joy for anyone who loves to read.

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"Visitors often ask if I've read all my books;my usual answer is that I've certainly opened every one of them."

In this wonderful tome ,Alberto Manguel has given anyone who loves books a fascinating look at books,libraries and the captivating world of books in general.
Books have been a major part of the author,s life,and he shares it with us on both a personal and worldwide basis. Generally speaking,anyone who loves books,can never resist the desire to have their own library.In this 373 page book ,he touches on just about every aspect of a library,both those which are personal and those which are public or private.The reader will constantly think of their own library as he discusses all these things. How and why the books are acquired,how are they arranged,how are they catalogued,how long are they kept,how hard were they to acquire,what will become of them,what about lending them,which are your favorites and why,where are they housed;you name it ,he talks about it.
I have a place in my library where I keep "Books About Books".I love to read about books and this one will be at home with them.
This book is beautifully written with a copious amount of amazing photographs. Because the author covers so much in the book,it never gets laboured and there is something new and interesting on every page.
Some of the things are simple ,such as the price-stickers,which he so aptly calls "these evil white scabs".They annoy me as well,and I have found a product called "Goo Gone" a great help in getting rid of them.This reminds me of those "evil doer of deeds" in some bookstores who price-clip the dust jackets because in their little minds they don't think the customers can handle the published price versus what they are asking. I am always interested in the published price of older books and their actions are nothing short of vandalism in what they do. Manguel also talks about items or bookplates readers leave in books as interesting as well, as notes made by other readers and previous owners or readers. Personally,I enjoy these things because they are a bit of the story of the life of that book.
He talks about libraries throughout history and even makes comments about things today,such as; an echo of Carlyle's complaint: "Every day the library is filled with,among others,people sleeping,students doing their homework,bright young things writing film scripts-in fact,doing almost anything except consulting the library's books." Ain't that the truth!!He tells us about the personal libraries of the famous (Rudyard Kipling) and the infamous (Adolf Hitler); with pictures.He talks extensively about his personal library from the time when he was a child to the present time. The reader cannot help but compare the author's to his own.
There are an amazing 44 pages of notes at the end covering 367 sources of information,photo credits and a detailed index. This alone is a treasure trove of information.
It's hard not to go on and on about this book.So,I'll leave it at this and just suggest to pick it up,and see for yourself what a treasure it is.
Overall, a mesmerizing gift from one booklover to all of us other booklovers

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Consolation

I can not imagine a better gift than this to buy for a person who loves collections of books, whether as a professional librarian or one who simply possesses a private library (big or small).

Alberto Manguel is a wise and learned author. The lessons of his well written book go beyond libraries and touch on what makes us human, and that which connects us, across time and as people, to our historical past.

A wealth of erudite anecdotes about books and libraries, but not much more

In part, its most successful part, THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT is a collection of anecdotes about books and libraries, a worthwhile addition to the pantheon of "books on books". To give you some idea of the broad array of bookish matters and historical or literary figures discussed at some length, here are ones that were new to me or which I found particularly interesting: Zumarraga, who spent seven years as head of the Inquisition in Mexico and tracked down and destroyed much of the vast literature of the Aztecs; Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence; the Islamic libraries in Chinguetti and Oudane, in Mauritania; the repository at Dunhuang, along the Great Silk Road; Borges and his library; and Aby Warburg and his idiosyncratic library.

But Manguel clearly has tried to make THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT more than a collection of anecdotes; he interlaces his rich array of factual information with his personal observations and comments about books, libraries, civilization and culture, and humanity. I find this latter effort much less interesting or successful. Manguel seems to be a poet at heart, such that many of his "philosophical" forays flirt with nonsense and impart a tone that is a little too precious, at least for my taste. He has a smooth, flowing writing style, but like the waves at the shore it begins to lull you to sleep if you read more than a chapter at a time. And speaking of chapters, I find the "structure" -- fifteen separate chapters, titled "The Library as Myth", "The Library as Order", "...as Space", "...as Power", and so on through eleven more conceptual nouns until at last we arrive at "The Library as Home" -- too contrived.

I fear that I have been overly harsh. So I will add one more star to my overall assessment and move on.

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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.

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