The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  And, piling them in one sin-heap, burned the whole;

  But he took the trouble to keep the calendar

  By which the Devil had taught them to count time.

  The impious creatures tallied back as far

  As ninety million years before Eve’s crime.

  That was enough: they burned the Mayan books,

  Saved souls and kept their own in proper trim.

  Diego de Landa in heaven always looks

  Towards God: God never looks at him.145

  Diego de Landa’s contemporary Friar Juan de Zumárraga, “a name that should be as immortal as that of Omar,” says William Prescott in his classic Conquest of Mexico,146 did likewise with the books of the Aztecs. Zumárraga was born in Durango, Spain, in 1468 and studied in the Franciscan monastery of Aránzazu, in the Basque Country. Appointed to the Most Holy Office of the Inquisition, he received his first inquisitorial commission from the Emperor Charles v “to hunt the witches of Biscay” in northern Spain. Zumárraga proved himself so successful that shortly afterwards he was posted to the Viceroyalty of Mexico as bishop-elect. In 1547, Pope Paul II crowned him first archbishop of Mexico.

  A nineteenth-century engraving based on a sixteenth-century portrait of Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga.

  Zumárraga spent seven years as head of the Mexican Inquisition, from 1536 to 1543, during which time he wrote a catechism for native neophytes and a brief manual of Christian doctrine for use in the missions, supervised the translation of the Bible into a number of native languages and founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco, where the sons of the native nobility were taught Latin, philosophy, rhetoric and logic so that they could become “good Christians.” Zumárraga’s name, however, is mainly associated with two events that profoundly affected the history of Mexico: he was responsible for creating the first printing press in the New World, and for destroying most of the vast literature of the Aztec Empire.

  Zumárraga had long been convinced of the need to print locally the books required for the conversion of the natives, since he felt that it was difficult to control, across the ocean, the accuracy of translations into native languages, and the contents of doctrinal books for a native audience. In 1533, on a return voyage to Spain, he visited several printers in Seville in order to find one willing to assist him in establishing a printing press in Mexico. He found his partner in the person of Jacobo Cromberger, a converted Jew with long experience in the making of books, who was willing to invest in the overseas enterprise “a press, ink, type and paper, as well as other implements of the trade, the whole estimated at 100,000 maravedís,”147 and to send as his representative one of his assistants, an Italian known as Juan Pablos or Giovanni Paoli.

  The ways of censors are mysterious. Zumárraga’s obligation as Inquisitor was to seek out and punish all those perceived to be enemies of the Catholic Church—idolaters, adulterers, blasphemers, witches, Lutherans, Moors and Jews—and he did so with extraordinary ferocity. Converted Jews had, since the days of Columbus, been denied permission to establish themselves in the colonies. But since the financial capital required to set up business in the New World was often in the hands of Jewish and Moorish converts, illegal immigration became common in the early years of the sixteenth century, and by 1536 there was a sizable Jewish community in Mexico. The first Mexican ordinance against heretics and Jews dates from 1523, decreeing that those who denounced a converted Jew who practised his religion secretly would benefit from a third of the Jew’s confiscated property (the other two-thirds going to the royal treasurer and to the judge). Accordingly, accusations flourished, and Zumárraga in particular persecuted the Jews with relentless determination, often condemning them to be burnt at the stake on the flimsiest of evidence.148 It is therefore puzzling to learn that Zumárraga chose the services of a converted Jew to establish his Mexican press. Though he must have been aware of his partner’s bloodline, Zumárraga left no comment on his choice, and we can wonder, at a distance of almost five centuries, how the Inquisitor justified his relationship with the “impure” Cromberger.

  Nor do we know whether Zumárraga understood the paradox of on the one hand creating books, and on the other hand destroying them. Shortly after his appointment as head of the Inquisition, he sent troops to the farthest corners of the colony to ferret out anyone suspected of possessing Aztec religious objects or illuminated books. Through bribes and torture he discovered the location of important collections of art and entire native libraries the Aztec notables had hidden away, “especially from Tezcuco,” Prescott writes, “the most cultivated capital in Anahuac, and the great depository of the national archives.” Finally, after an astonishing number of paintings and books had been collected by his emissaries, Zumárraga had them piled in a tall heap in the marketplace of Tlaltelolco, and burnt. The fire, witnesses say, lasted several days and nights.

  Thanks to the efforts of other, more enlightened Spaniards (of Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, for example, who preserved and translated a number of Aztec texts), we have an approximate idea of what was lost: a complex vision of the universe, with its theology, its songs, its stories, its historical chronicles, its works of philosophy and divination, its scientific treatises and astronomical charts.149 Among the treasures that miraculously survived, in 1924 scholars discovered, in the so-called Secret Archives of the Vatican, fourteen of the thirty chapters of the Book of Dialogues, the last major work in Nahuatl (one of the many languages spoken in the Aztec Empire), written in the mid-sixteenth century. In this book, a group of native priests and scholars defend the Aztec view of the world against Catholic dogma, in a dramatic series of dialogues reminiscent of those of Plato. Works like the Book of Dialogues (and there were no doubt many) would have helped Europeans understand the people they were encountering, and allowed for an exchange of wisdom and experience.

  Even from a political and religious point of view, the destruction of an opposing culture is always an act of stupidity, since it denies the possibility of allegiance, conversion or assimilation. The Spanish Dominican Diego Durán, writing shortly before his death in 1588, argued that in order to attempt to convert the natives of the New World it was necessary to know their customs and religion, and he blamed those who, like Diego de Landa and Zumárraga, burnt the ancient books:

  Those who with fervent zeal (though with little prudence) in the beginning burned and destroyed all the ancient Indian pictographic documents were mistaken. They left us without a light to guide us—to the point that the Indians worship idols in our presence, and we understand nothing of what goes on in their dances, in their marketplaces, in their bathhouses, in the songs they chant (when they lament their ancient gods and lords), in their repasts and banquets; these things mean nothing to us.150

  Few of those in power paid attention to Durán’s warnings. The destruction of the books of pre-Columbian America exemplify the fear that those in power have of the subversive capabilities of the written word. Sometimes they believe that even committing books to the flames is not enough. Libraries, in their very being, not only assert but also question the authority of power. As repositories of history or sources for the future, as guides or manuals for difficult times, as symbols of authority past or present, the books in a library stand for more than their collective contents, and have, since the beginning of writing, been considered a threat. It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality. “We scorn,” wrote Tacitus in the first century, “the blindness of those who believe that with an arrogant act even the memory of posterity can be extinguished. In fact, the sentence increases the prestige of the noble spirits they wish to silence, and for
eign potentates, or those others who have used similar violence, have obtained nothing other than shame for themselves and lasting fame for their enemies.”151

  The libraries that have vanished or have never been allowed to exist greatly surpass in number those we can visit, and form the links of a circular chain that accuses and condemns us all. Three and a half centuries after Omar’s riposte, the notorious Abi-Amir al-Mansur, Moorish regent of Córdoba, condemned to the flames a rare collection of scientific and philosophical works collected in the Andalusian libraries by his predecessors. As if answering across the ages Omar’s pitiless judgment, the historian Sa’id the Spaniard was moved to observe, “These sciences were despised by the old and criticized by the mighty, and those who studied them were accused of heresy and heterodoxy. Thereafter, those who had the knowledge held their tongue, went into hiding and kept secret what they knew for a more enlightened age.”152 We are still waiting. Five centuries later, in 1526, Ottoman soldiers led by Sultan Suleiman 11 rode into Buda and set fire to the Great Corvina Library, founded by King Matthias Corvinus in 1471 and said to have been one of the jewels of the Hungarian crown, in an attempt to annihilate the culture of the people they had conquered.153 A further three centuries after that destruction, in 1806, Suleiman’s descendants emulated them by burning the extraordinary Fatimid Library in Cairo, containing over a hundred thousand precious volumes.154

  In our time, a government’s methods of censorship are less drastic but still effective. In March 1996 the French minister of Culture, Philippe Douste-Blazy, objecting to the cultural policies of the Mayor of Orange, a member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right-wing party, ordered the inspection of the municipal library of that city. The report, published three months later, concluded that the Orange librarians were under orders from the mayor to withdraw certain books and magazines from the library shelves: any publications of which Le Pen’s followers might disapprove, any books by authors critical of the party, and certain foreign literature (North African folk tales, for example) that was considered not part of true French cultural heritage.155

  Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Congress of the United States passed a law, Section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, allowing federal agents to obtain records of books borrowed at any public library or bought at any private bookstore. “Unlike traditional search warrants, this new power does not require officers to have evidence of any crime, nor provide evidence to a court that their target is suspected of one. Nor are library staff allowed to tell targeted individuals that they are being investigated.”156 Under such requirements, a number of libraries in the United States, kowtowing to the authorities, reconsidered the purchase of various titles.

  Sometimes, it is nothing but a random act that determines the fate of a library. In 1702, the scholar Arni Magnusson learned that the impoverished inhabitants of Iceland, starving and naked under Danish rule, had raided the ancient libraries of their country—in which unique copies of the Eddas had been kept for over six hundred years—in order to turn the poetic parchment into winter clothes. Alerted to this vandalism, King Frederick iv of Denmark ordered Magnusson to sail to Iceland and rescue the precious manuscripts. It took Magnusson ten years to strip the thieves and reassemble the collection, which, though soiled and tailored, was shipped back to Copenhagen, where it was carefully guarded for another fourteen-odd years—until a fire reduced it to illiterate ashes.157

  Will libraries always exist under such uncertainties? Perhaps not. Virtual libraries, if they become technologically resilient, can circumvent some of these threats; there would no longer be any justification for culling, since cyberspace is practically infinite, and censorship would no longer affect the majority of readers, since a censor, confined to one administration and one place, cannot prevent a reader from calling up a forbidden text from somewhere faraway, beyond the censor’s rule. A caveat, however: the censor can employ the Internet as his own instrument and punish the reader after the act. In 2005 the Internet giant Yahoo! provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a journalist, Shi Tao, for supposedly using a New York–based website to obtain and post forbidden texts, for which he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.158

  But in spite of such dangers, examples of the freedom offered by the Web are numerous. In Iran, under the tyranny of the mullahs, students could still read on-line all kinds of forbidden literature; in Cuba, dissidents have Internet access to the published reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations; in Rhodesia, readers can open onscreen the books of banned writers.

  And even paper and ink can sometimes survive a death sentence. One of the lost plays of Sophocles is The Loves of Achilles, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillaging and fires or excluded from library catalogues because perhaps the librarian deemed the play of little interest or of poor literary quality. A few words were, however, miraculously preserved. “In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia,” Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play The Invention of Love, “in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children.”159 I trust that book-burners’ dreams are haunted by such modest proof of the book’s survival.

  THE LIBRARY

  AS SHAPE

  Let no one enter who does not know geometry.

  Inscription on Plato’s door, at the Academy at Athens

  The first view I had of what was to be my library was one of rocks and dust covering a rectangular space of approximately six by thirteen metres. The toppled stones lay between the pigeon tower and the furnace room that was to become my study; powdery sand showered the leaves of the creeper every time a bird settled on the dividing wall. The architect who eventually drew the library’s plans (fortunately for me) lives in the village. She insisted that traditional methods be used to clean the wall and rebuild the space, and she contracted masons knowledgable in the handling of the local stone, tuffeau, which is soft as sandstone and the colour of butter. It was an extraordinary sight to see these men work row by row, placing stone next to stone with the ability of skilled typographers in an old-fashioned printing shop. The image came to mind because in local parlance the large stones are known as upper case (majuscules) and the small ones as lower case (minuscules), and during the building of the library it seemed utterly appropriate that these inheritors of the bricklayers of Babel should mix stones and letters in their labours. “Passe-moi une majuscule!” they would call to one another, while my books waited silently in their boxes for the day of resurrection.

  The amicable Toronto Reference Library.

  Books lend a room a particular identity that can, in some cases, usurp that of their owner—a peculiarity well known to oafish personalities who demand to be portrayed against the background of a book-lined wall, in the hope that it will grant them a scholarly lustre. Seneca mocked ostentatious readers who relied on such walls to lend them intellectual prestige; he argued for possessing only a small number of books, not “endless bookshelves for the ignorant to decorate their dining-rooms.”160 In turn, the space in which we keep our books changes our relationship to them. We don’t read books in the same way sitting inside a circle or inside a square, in a room with a low ceiling or in one with high rafters. And the mental atmosphere we create in the act of reading, the imaginary space we construct when we lose ourselves in the pages of a book, is confirmed or refuted by the physical space of the library, and is affected by the distance of the shelves, the crowding or paucity of books, by qualities of scent and touch and by the varying degrees of light and shade. “Every librarian is, up to a certain point, an architect,” observed Michel Melot, director of the Centre Pompidou Library in Paris. “He builds up his collection as an ensemble through which the r
eader must find a path, discover his own self, and live.”161

  TOP: The King’s Library in Buckingham House in London.

  BOTTOM: The semi-cylindrical ceiling of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona.

  The library I had imagined for my books, long before its walls were erected, already reflected the way in which I wished to read. There are readers who enjoy trapping a story within the confines of a tiny enclosure; others for whom a round, vast, public space better allows them to imagine the text stretching out towards far horizons; others still who find pleasure in a maze of rooms through which they can wander, chapter after chapter. I had dreamt of a long, low library where there would always be enough darkness around the pools of light on the desk to suggest that it was night outside, a rectangular space in which the walls would mirror one another and in which I could always feel as if the books on either side were almost at arm’s length. I read in a haphazard way, allowing books to associate freely, to suggest links by their mere proximity, to call to one another across the room. The shape I chose for my library encourages my reading habits.

  ABOVE: Design for the library of the brain-shaped Freie Universität in Berlin.

  The idea of a library set down on paper, still unpeopled by readers and books, as yet devoid of shelves and partitions, is nothing but the frame of a given style of reading, the reduction of an as yet shapeless universe to its minimum expression: pure geometrical form. Square spaces contain and dissect; circular spaces proclaim continuity; other shapes evoke other qualities. The Toronto Reference Library is a progression of ascending disks. The library of Buckingham House (where King George iii kept his books) was octagonal. The first Ambrosiana Library in Milan, lodged in three refurbished houses barely fit for “pigs and cheeky prostitutes,”162 occupied a narrow rectangle. The library of the Freie Universität in Berlin was designed by Norman Foster to resemble a skull and is now nicknamed The Brain. The Bibliothèque de France, in Paris, has the shape of an inverted table. The Biblioteca de Catalunya, in Barcelona, is a cylinder cut lengthwise in half. The Wolfenbüttel Library in Germany was designed by the architect Hermann Korb in the shape of an oval. The Freiburg University Library, built in 1902, is in the shape of a triangle.