The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  And yet, as a public space the Library of Alexandria was a paradox, a building set aside for an essentially private craft (reading) which now was to take place communally. Under the Library’s roof, scholars shared an illusion of freedom, convinced that the entire reading realm was theirs for the asking. In fact, their choice was censored in a number of ways: by the stack (open or closed) on which the book sat, by the section of the library in which it had been catalogued, by privileged notions of reserved rooms or special collections, by generations of librarians whose ethics and tastes had shaped the collection, by official guidelines based on what Ptolemaic society considered “proper” or “valuable,” by bureaucratic rulings whose reasons were lost in the dungeons of time, by considerations of budget and size and availability.

  The Ptolemies and their librarians were certainly aware that memory was power. Hecateus of Abdera, in his semi-fictional book of travels, the Egyptiaca, had claimed that Greek culture owed its existence to Egypt, whose culture was more ancient and morally far superior.30 Mere assertion was not enough, and the librarians of Alexandria dutifully set up a vast collection of Greek works to confirm the debt of these to Egyptian authority. Not just Greek; through the collection of books of various pasts, the librarians hoped to grant their readers knowledge of the interwoven roots and branches of human culture, which (as Simone Weil was much later to declare) can be defined as “the formation of attention.”31 For this purpose, they trained themselves to become attentive to the world beyond their borders, gathering and interpreting information, ordering and cataloguing all manner of books, seeking to associate different texts and to transform thought by association.

  By housing as many books as possible under one single roof, the librarians of Alexandria also tried to protect them from the risk of destruction that might result if left in what were deemed to be less caring hands (an argument adopted by many Western museums and libraries today). Therefore, as well as being an emblem of man’s power to act through thought, the Library became a monument intended to defeat death, which, as poets tell us, puts an end to memory.

  And yet, in spite of all the concern of its rulers and librarians, the Library of Alexandria vanished. Just as we know almost nothing of the shape it had when it was erected, we know nothing certain about its disappearance, sudden or gradual. According to Plutarch, during Julius Caesar’s stay in Alexandria in 47 B.C. a fire spread from the Arsenal and “put an end to the great Library,” but his account is faulty. Other historians (Dio Cassius and Orosius, drawing their information from Livy and from Caesar’s own De bello alexandrino) suggested that Caesar’s fire destroyed not the Library itself but some forty thousand volumes stored near the Arsenal, where they were possibly awaiting shipment to Rome. Almost seven centuries later, another possible ending was offered. A Christian chronicle, drawn from the Ta’rikh al-Hukuma or Chronicle of Wise Men by Ibn al-Kifti and now discredited, blamed the destruction on the Muslim general Amr ibn al-As, who, upon entering Alexandria in A.D. 642, was supposed to have ordered Caliph Omar I to set fire to the contents of the Library. The books, always according to the Christian narrator, were used to feed the stoves of the public baths; only the works of Aristotle were spared.32

  Historically, in the light of day, the end of the Library remains as nebulous as its true aspect; historically, the Tower, if it ever existed, was nothing but an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate enterprise. As myths, however, in the imagination at night, the solidity of both buildings is unimpeachable. We can admire the mythical Tower rising visibly to prove that the impossible is worth attempting, no matter how devastating the result; we can see it working its way upwards, the fruit of a unanimous, all-invading, antlike society; we can witness its end in the dispersion of its individuals, each in the isolation of his own linguistic circle. We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man’s experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.

  The Library of Alexandria, implicit in travellers’ memoirs and historians’ chronicles, re-invented in works of fiction and of fable, has come to stand for the riddle of human identity, posing shelf after shelf the question “Who am I?” In Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel Die Blendung (Auto da Fé), Peter Kien, the scholar who in the last pages sets fire to himself and to his books when he feels that the outside world has become too unbearably intrusive, incarnates every inheritor of the Library, as a reader whose very self is enmeshed in the books he possesses and who, like one of the ancient Alexandrian scholars, must himself become dust in the night when the library is no more. Dust indeed, the poet Francisco de Quevedo noted, early in the seventeenth century. And then added, with the same faith in the survival of the spirit that the Library of Alexandria embodied, “Dust it shall be, but dust in love.”33

  THE LIBRARY

  AS ORDER

  “But how do you arrange your documents?”

  “In pigeon-holes, partly….”

  “Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes,

  but everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes:

  I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”

  George Eliot, Middlemarch

  Sitting in my library at night, I watch in the pools of light the implacable plankton of dust shed by both the pages and my skin, hourly casting off layer after dead layer in a feeble attempt at persistence. I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I’ll still be with my books.

  The truth is, I can’t remember a time when I did not live surrounded by my library. By the age of seven or eight, I had assembled in my room a minuscule Alexandria, about one hundred volumes of different formats on all sorts of subjects. For the sake of variety, I kept changing their groupings. I would decide, for instance, to place them by size so that each shelf contained only volumes of the same height. I discovered much later that I had an illustrious predecessor, Samuel Pepys, who in the seventeenth century built little high heels for his smaller volumes, so that the tops all followed a neat horizontal line.34 I began by placing on my lowest shelf the large volumes of picture-books: a German edition of Die Welt, in der wir leben, with detailed illustrations of the world under the sea and life in an autumn undergrowth (even today I can perfectly recall the iridescent fish and the monstrous insects), a collection of stories about cats (from which I still remember the line “Cats’ names and cats’ faces/ Are often seen in public places”), the several titles of Constancio C. Vigil (an Argentine children’s writer who was also a secret collector of pornographic literature), a book of tales and poems by Margaret Wise Brown (it included a terrifying story about a boy who is successively abandoned by the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms) and a treasured old edition of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter in which I carefully avoided the picture of a tailor cutting off a boy’s thumbs with a huge pair of scissors. Next came my books with odd shapes: single volumes of folk tales, a few pop-up books on animals, a tattered atlas which I studied carefully, trying to discover microscopic people in the tiny cities that dotted its continents. On a separate shelf I grouped what I called my “normal-size” books: May Lamberton Becker’s Rainbow Classics, Emilio Salgari’s pirate adventures, a two-volume Childhood of Famous Painters, Roy Rockwood’s Bomba saga, the complete fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen, the children’s novels of the great Brazilian author Monteiro Lobato, Edmundo de Amicis’s infamously sentimental Cuore, full of heroic and long-suffering infants. A whole shelf was given over to the many embossed red-and-blue volumes of a Spanish-language encyclopedia, El Tesoro de la juventud. My Golden Books series, slightly smaller, went on a lower shelf. Beatrix Potter and a
German collection of tales from the Arabian Nights formed the last, miniature section.

  One of the bookcases that houses Pepys’s collection at the Bodleian Library.

  But sometimes this order would not satisfy me and I’d reorganize my books by subject: fairy tales on one shelf, adventure stories on another, scientific and travel volumes on a third, poetry on a fourth, biographies on a fifth. And sometimes, just for the sake of change, I would group my books by language, or by colour, or according to my degree of fondness for them. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Younger described the joys of his place in the country, and among these a sunny room where “one wall is fitted with shelves like a library to hold the books I read and reread.”35 At times, I’ve thought of having a library that consisted of nothing but my most thumbed volumes.

  Then there would be groupings within groupings. As I learned then, but was not able to articulate until much later, order begets order. Once a category is established, it suggests or imposes others, so that no cataloguing method, whether on shelf or on paper, is ever closed unto itself. If I decide on a number of subjects, each of these subjects will require a classification within its classification. At a certain point in the ordering, out of fatigue, boredom or frustration, I’ll stop this geometrical progression. But the possibility of continuing it is always there. There are no final categories in a library.

  A private library, unlike a public one, presents the advantage of allowing a whimsical and highly personal classification. The invalid writer Valéry Larbaud would have his books bound in different colours according to the language in which they were written, English novels in blue, Spanish in red, etc. “His sickroom was a rainbow,” said one of his admirers, “that allowed his eye and his memory surprises and expected pleasures.”36 The novelist Georges Perec once listed a dozen ways in which to classify one’s library, “none satisfactory in itself.”37 He halfheartedly suggested the following orders:

  ~ alphabetically

  ~ by continent or country

  ~ by colour

  ~ by date of purchase

  ~ by date of publication

  ~ by format

  ~ by genre

  ~ by literary period

  ~ by language

  ~ according to our reading priorities

  ~ according to their binding

  ~ by series

  Such classifications may serve a singular, private purpose. A public library, on the other hand, must follow an order whose code can be understood by every user and which is decided upon before the collection is set up on the shelves. Such a code is more easily applied to an electronic library, since its cataloguing system can, while serving all readers, also allow a superimposed program to classify (and therefore locate) titles entered in no predetermined order, without having to be constantly rearranged and updated.

  Sometimes the classification precedes the material ordering. In my library in the reconstructed barn, long before my books were put away in obedient rows, they clustered in my mind around specific subject-headings that probably made sense to me alone. It seemed therefore an easy task, when in the summer of 2003 I started to arrange my library, to file into specific spaces the volumes already consigned to a clear set of categories. I soon discovered that I had been overly confident.

  For several weeks I unpacked the hundreds of boxes that had, until then, taken up the whole of the dining-room, carried them into the empty library and then stood bewildered among teetering columns of books that seemed to combine the vertical ambition of Babel with the horizontal greed of Alexandria. For almost three months I sifted through these piles, attempting to create some kind of order, working from early in the morning to very late at night. The thick walls kept the room cool and peaceful, and the rediscovery of old and forgotten friends made me oblivious of the time. Suddenly I would look up and find that it was dark outside, and that I had spent the entire day filling only a few expectant shelves. Sometimes I worked throughout the night, and then I would imagine all kinds of fantastical arrangements for my books that later, in the light of day, I dismissed as sadly impractical.

  Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. Writing in 1931, during one of his many moves, Walter Benjamin described the experience of standing among his books “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order,”38 haunted by visions of the times and places he had collected them, of the circumstantial evidence that rendered each volume truly his. I too, during those summer months, was overwhelmed by these visions: a ticket fluttering away from an opened book reminded me of a tram ride in Buenos Aires (trams stopped running in the late sixties) when I first read Julian Green’s Moira; a name and phone number inscribed on a fly-leaf brought back the face of a friend long lost who gave me a copy of the Cantos of Ezra Pound; a paper napkin with the logo of the Café de Flore, folded inside Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, attested to my first trip to Paris in 1966; a letter from a teacher inside a collection of Spanish poetry made me think of distant classes where I first heard of Góngora and Vicente Gaos. “Habent sua fata libelli,” says Benjamin, quoting the forgotten medieval essayist Maurus. “Books have their own fates.” Some of mine have waited half a century to reach this tiny place in western France, for which they were seemingly destined.

  I had, as I have said, previously conceived of organizing my library into several sections. Principal among these were the languages in which the books were written. I had formed vast mental communities of those works written in English or Spanish, German or French, whether poetry or prose. From these linguistic pools I would exclude certain titles that belonged to subjects of interest to me, such as Greek Mythology, Monotheistic Religions, Legends of the Middle Ages, Cultures of the Renaissance, First and Second World Wars, History of the Book. … My choice of what to lodge under these categories might seem whimsical to many readers. Why stash the works of Saint Augustine in the Christianity section rather than under Literature in Latin or Early Medieval Civilizations? Why place Carlyle’s French Revolution in Literature in English rather than in European History, and not Simon Schama’s Citizens? Why keep Louis Ginzberg’s seven volumes of Legends of the Jews under Judaism but Joseph Gaer’s study on the Wandering Jew under Myths? Why place Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho under Carson but Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses under Ovid? Why keep my two pocket volumes of Chapman’s Homer under Keats?

  Ultimately, every organization is arbitrary. In libraries of friends around the world, I have found many odd classifications: Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre under Sailing, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe under Travel, Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America under Ornithology, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked under Cuisine. But public libraries have their own odd approaches. One reader was upset because, in the London Library, Stendhal was listed under “B” for his real name, Beyle, and Gérard de Nerval under “G.” Another complained that, in the same library, Women were classed “under the Miscellaneous end of Science,” after Witchcraft and before Wool and Wrestling.39 In the Library of Congress’s catalogues, the subject-headings include such curious categories as:

  ~ banana research

  ~ bat binding

  ~ boots and shoes in art

  ~ chickens in religion and folklore

  ~ sewage: collected works

  It is as if the contents of the books matter less to these organizers than the uniqueness of the subject under which they are catalogued, so that a library becomes a collection of thematic anthologies. Certainly, the subjects or categories into which a library is divided not only change the nature of the books it contains (read or unread) but also, in turn, are changed by them. To place Robert Musil’s novels in a section on Austrian Literature circumscribes his work by nationalistic definitions of novel-writing; at the same time, it illuminates neighbouring sociological and historical works on the Austro-Hungarian Empire by expanding their restrictive scholarly views on the subject. Inclusion of Anton Chekhov’s Strange Confession in the section of Detective Novels forces the reader to follow the story
with the requisite attention to murder, clues and red herrings; it also opens the notion of the crime genre to authors such as Chekhov, not usually associated with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. If I place Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita in my section on Argentinian History do I diminish the book’s literary value? If I place it under Fiction in Spanish am I dismissing its historical accuracy?

  Sir Robert Cotton, an eccentric seventeenth-century English bibliophile, ranged his books (which included many rare manuscripts, such as the only known manuscript of Beowulf, and the Lindisfarne Gospels, from about A.D. 698) in twelve bookcases, each adorned with the bust of one of the first twelve Caesars. When the British Library acquired some of his collection, it kept Cotton’s strange cataloguing system, so that the Lindisfarne Gospels can today be requested as “Cotton MS. Nero D. IV” because it was once the fourth book on the fourth shelf down in the bookcase topped by the bust of Nero.40

  And yet order of almost any kind has the merit of containing the uncontainable. “There is probably many an old collector,” G.K. Chesterton observed, “whose friends and relations say that he is mad on Elzevirs, when as a matter of fact it is the Elzevirs that keep him sane. Without them he would drift into soul-destroying idleness and hypochondria; but the drowsy regularity of his notes and calculations teaches something of the same lesson as the swing of the smith’s hammer or the plodding of the ploughman’s horses, the lesson of the ancient commonsense of things.”41 The ordering of a collection of thrillers, or of books printed by Elzevir, grants the manic behaviour of the collector a certain degree of sanity. At times I feel as if the exquisite pocket-sized leather-bound Nelsons, the flimsy Brazilian booklets known as literatura de cordel (because they were sold by hawkers who strung their wares on thin cords), the early editions of the Séptimo Círculo detective series edited by Borges and Bioy Casares, the small square volumes of the New Temple Shakespeare published by Dent and illustrated with wood engravings by Eric Gill—all these books that I sporadically collect—have kept me sane.