To Gena Gorrell, whose critical, unrelenting, meticulous reading cleared the book of a vast number of errors and fatuities. To Deirdre Molina, for her painstaking care in following the book from manuscript to print. To C.S. Richardson, for another splendid book design. To Liba Berry, for the excellent proofread. To Michelle MacAleese, for her thorough photo research. To Barney Gilmore, for the comprehensive index.
To my editors, Rosellina Arquinto, Hans-Jürgen Balmes, Valeria Ciompi, Carmen Criado, Haye Koningsveld, Luiz Schwarcz, Marie-Catherine Vacher and, first and foremost, overriding the laws of the alphabet, Louise Dennys.
Finally, I’m deeply grateful to the S. Fischer Stiftung in Berlin and to the Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York for their financial assistance over the past years, without which this book would no doubt be still languishing in the future.
Notes
FOREWORD
1. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Pulvis et Umbra,” II, in Across the Plains (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892).
2. Northrop Frye, Notebook 3:128, in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by Robert D. Denham (Toronto: Anansi, 2004).
3. Francesco Petrarca, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” in Invectives, ed. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003).
THE LIBRARY AS MYTH
4. M. le Comte de Mondion, “Mondion, le chateau—la paroisse, 1096–1908,” in Bulletins de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest (Poitiers, second quarter of 1909).
5. R.L. Stevenson (in collaboration with Mrs. Stevenson), “The Dynamiter,” in More New Arabian Nights (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885).
6. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968).
7. Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), ed. J.D. Duff, IX:973 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1988).
8. Essais de Montaigne, ed. Amaury-Duval (Paris: Chassériau, 1820).
9. Ibid.
10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains, II: 206, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (New York: Harper, 1853).
11. Virginia Woolf, “Hours in a Library,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume ii, 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987).
12. Genesis 11:5–7.
13. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. I (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
14. Strabo, Geography, Book XIII, quoted by Luciano Canfora, “Aristote, ‘fondateur’ de la Bibliothèque d’Alexandrie,” in La nouvelle Bibliothèque d’Alexandrie, ed. Fabrice Pataut (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2003).
15. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, translated by and with an introduction by John Healy (London: Penguin, 1991); Book XII, 69–70.
16. Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1987).
17. Charles A. Goodrum & Helen W. Dalrymple, Guide to the Library of Congress, rev. edition (Washington: Library of Congress, 1988).
18. Christoph Kapeller, “L’architecture de la nouvelle Bibliothèque d’Alexandrie,” in Pataut, La nouvelle Bibliothèque d’Alexandrie.
19. Hipólito Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandría (Madrid: Gredos, 2001).
20. Mustafa El-Abbadi, La antigua biblioteca de Alejandría: Vida y destino, trans. José Luis García-Villalba Sotos (Madrid: UNESCO, 1994).
21. Strabo, Geography, Book XVII.
22. Franz Kafka, Die Erzählungen: Originalfassung (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2000).
23. See Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, Book XXI:9 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984).
24. Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandría.
25. Quoted in Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa.
26. Geo. Haven Putnam, A.M., Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, Vol. I (reprint) (New York: Hillary House, 1962).
27. “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre,” Stéphane Mallarmé, in “Réponses à des enquêtes, Sur l’évolution littéraire,” in Proses diverses (Paris: Gallimard, 1869).
28. Joseph Brodsky, “In a Room and a Half,” in Less Than One (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).
29. I discuss this project in my chapter “Peter Eisenman: The Image As Memory,” in Reading Pictures (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
30. Quoted in Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandría.
31. Quoted in Roberto Calasso, I quarantanove gradini (Milano: Adelphi, 1991).
32. These references are from Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa.
33. “Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado,” Francisco de Quevedo, in “Amor constante meas allá de la muerte,” in Antología poética (selected by, and with a prologue by, Jorge Luis Borges) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982).
THE LIBRARY AS ORDER
34. Pepys bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, exactly three thousand numbered volumes, beginning with the smallest and ending with the largest.
35. Pliny the Younger, Letters I-X, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, II:17:8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
36. “Sa chambre de douleur était un arc-en-ciel … réservant à l’oeil et au souvenir des surprises et des bonheurs attendus,” Michel Melot, in La sagesse du bibliothécaire (Paris: L’oeil neuf éditions, 2004).
37. Georges Perec, in Penser/Classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985).
38. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library.”
39. John Wells, Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library (Macmillan: London, 1991).
40. Terry Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1985).
41. G.K. Chesterton, “Lunacy and Letters,” in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, selected by Alberto Manguel (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000).
42. Jean-Pierre Drège, Les bibliothèques en Chine au temps des manuscrits (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1991).
43. W.F. Mayers, “Bibliography of the Chinese Imperial Collection of Literature,” China Review, Vol. VI, no. 4 (London, 1879).
44. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Foucault considers this kind of eclectic list a “distortion of classification that prevents us from conceiving it [the classification]” (“cette distorsion du classement qui nous empêche de le penser”).
45. Wolfgang Bauer, “The Encyclopaedia in China,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, Vol. IX, no. 3 (Paris, 1966).
46. Sergei A. Shuiskii, “Khallikan,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, Vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986).
47. El-Abbadi, La Antigua biblioteca de Alejandría.
48. Dorothy May Norris, A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods: 1100–1850, with an Introductory Survey of Ancient Times (London: Grafton & Co., 1939).
49. Houari Touati, L’armoire à sagesse: Bibliothèques et collections en Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2003).
50. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Vol. I:57 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1972).
51. Youssef Eche, Les bibliothèques arabes publiques et semi-publiques en Mésopotamie, en Syrie et en Egypte au Moyen-âge (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1967).
52. Touati, L’armoire à sagesse.
53. Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
54. D. Mallet, “La bibliothèque d’Avicenne,” in Studia Islamica, Vol. 83, 1996. Quoted in Touati, L’armoire à sagesse.
55. Suetonius, “Julius Caesar,” in The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1989).
56. Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
57. T. Birt, Die Buchrolle in der Kunst (Leipzig, 1907).
58. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, M.A. F.R.S., ed. Henry B. Wheatle
y F.S.A. (19 December, 1666), (London: George Bell & Sons, 1899).
59. Melvil Dewey, “Decimal Classification Beginning,” in Library Journal 45 (2/15/20). Quoted in Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago and London: American Library Association, 1996).
60. The latest revision of Dewey’s system, the XXI edition of 1998, has altered some of these classifications, so that now, while 200 is still attributed to Religion and 260 to Christian theology, 264 is reserved for Public Worship, and God can be found under three different headings: 211 (Concepts of God), 212 (Existence and Attributes) and 231 (Trinity and Divine Nature). See Lois Mai Chan, John P. Comaromi, Mohinder P. Satija, Classification décimale de Dewey: guide pratique (Montréal: Editions ASTED, 1995).
61. Dewey’s reading notebook entries, quoted in Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer.
62. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer.
63. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend.
64. Dewey’s reading notebook entries, quoted in Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer.
65. The Spanish method of granting priority to the father’s surname, e.g., García, doesn’t work if the author is known by his second surname.
66. Henry Green, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (London: The Hogarth Press, 1940).
THE LIBRARY AS SPACE
67. Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Paris: Hetzel, 1870). This same passage, in a similar context, is quoted by Perec in Penser/Classer. I am grateful to Cyril de Pins for pointing it out to me.
68. Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books.
69. A.N.L. Munby, Some Caricatures of Book-Collectors: An Essay (London: privately printed, 1948); quoted in Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books.
70. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889), in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1922).
71. Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1670) (Savigliano: Editrice artistica Piemontese, 2000).
72. Anthony Grafton, “Une bibliothèque humaniste: Ferrare,” in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques: La mémoire des livres en Occident, under the direction of Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).
73. Quoted in Grafton, “Une bibliothèque humaniste: Ferrare.”
74. Ibid.
75. Robert D. McFadden, “Recluse buried by paper avalanche,” in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 31 December, 2003).
76. See Nicholson Baker, “The Author vs. the Library,” The New Yorker (New York, 14 October, 1996).
77. Goodrum & Dalrymple, Guide to the Library of Congress.
78. Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001).
79. Quoted in Baker, Double Fold, p. 257.
80. Robin McKie and Vanessa Thorpe, “Digital Domesday Book,” in The Observer (London, 3 March, 2002).
81. Katie Hafner, “Memories on Computers May Be Lost to Time,” in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 28 November, 2004).
82. Robert F. Worth, “Collecting the world’s books online,” in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 1–2 March, 2003).
83. The New York Times (14 December, 2004).
84. Genesis 11:1–9.
85. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, I:1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
86. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (London: Dent, 1872).
87. Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, seconde édition revue corrigée & augmentée (Paris: Chez Rolet le Duc, 1644).
88. Marie-Catherine Rey, “Figurer l’être des hommes,” in Visions du futur: Une histoire des peurs et des espoirs de l’humanité (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000).
89. Quoted in P.N. Furbank, Diderot (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1992).
90. Jean-François Marmontel, in his Memoirs, quoted in Furbank, Diderot.
91. “Le but de l’Encyclopédie est de rassembler les connaissances éparses sur la surface de la terre; d’en exposer le système général aux hommes qui viendront après nous, afin que les travaux des siècles passés n’aient pas été des travaux inutiles pour les siècles à venir…. Que l’Encyclopédie devienne un sanctuaire où les connaissances des hommes soient à l’abri des temps et des revolutions.” Denis Diderot, in “Encyclopédie,” in D. Diderot et Jean d’Alembert, L’Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751–72).
92. Guillaume Grivel, L’Isle inconnue, ou Mémoires du chevalier de Gastines. Recueillis et publiés par M. Grivel, des Académies de Dijon, de La Rochelle, de Rouen, de la Société Philosophique de Philadelphie etc. (Paris: Moutard, 1783–87).
93. Quoted in Furbank, Diderot.
94. Ibid.
95. Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).
96. Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters, translated by and with an introduction by Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1958).
97. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1923).
98. Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca total,” in Sur (Buenos Aires, August 1939), later developed as “La Biblioteca de Babel,” in Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944).
99. Idem, El congreso (Buenos Aires: El Archibrazo, 1971).
THE LIBRARY AS POWER
100. Muhammad b. ’Abd al-Rahman al-’Uthmani, Idah al-ta’rif bi- ba’d fada’il al-’ilm al-sharif, Princeton University Library, Yahuda Ms. No. 4293, quoted in Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
101. Quoted in Hipólito Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1985).
102. Fritz Milkau, Handbuch der Bibliothekswissenschaft, ed. Georg Leyh (Wiesbaden: G. Harrassowitz, 1952).
103. Emile Zola, L’assommoir.
104. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Le passage (Paris: Laffont, 1994).
105. Juan Domingo Perón, “Discurso del Presidente de la Nación Argentina General Juan Perón pronunciado en la Academia Argentina de Letras con motivo del Día de la Raza y como homenaje en memoria de Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra en el cuarto centenario de su nacimiento” (Buenos Aires, 12 October, 1947).
106. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.
107. Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays, ed. Edward C. Kirkland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
108. Long Overdue: A Library Reader, ed. Alan Taylor (London and Edinburgh: The Library Association Publishing and Mainstream Publishing Company, 1993).
109. Thomas Carlyle, letter dated 18 May, 1832, in The Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London: Macmillan, 1888).
110. Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
111. Quoted in John K. Winkler, Incredible Carnegie (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931).
112. Thomas Morrison, “Rights of Land,” unpublished manuscript quoted in Peter Krass, Carnegie (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).
113. Quoted in Wall, Andrew Carnegie.
114. Krass, Carnegie.
115. Andrew Carnegie, speech at Grangemouth, Scotland, September 1887, quoted in Burton J. Hendrick, The Life of Andrew Carnegie (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1932).
116. Quoted in Krass, Carnegie.
117. Quoted in Winkler, Incredible Carnegie.
118. Krass, Carnegie.
119. Quoted in George S. Bobinski, Carnegie Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1969).
120. Krass, Carnegie.
121. Andrew Carnegie, Round the World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884).
122. John Updike, “I Was a Teen-Age Library User,” in Odd Jobs (London: André Deutsch, 1992).
123. Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University P
ress, 1984).
124. H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fourth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924).
125. Quoted in Bobinski, Carnegie Libraries.
THE LIBRARY AS SHADOW
126. Archibald MacLeish, “Of the Librarian’s Profession,” in A Time to Speak (London: Faber, 1941).
127. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964).
128. David Diringer, The Book before Printing (New York: Dover, 1982).
129. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.
130. Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas.
131. Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie. L’écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
132. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.
133. He was also the celebrated author of a treatise on the prostitutes of Attica.
134. Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas.
135. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken, 1984).
136. Brodsky, “To Please a Shadow,” in Less Than One.
137. Eduardo Anguita and Martín Caparrós, La voluntad: Una historia de la militancia revolucionaria en la Argentina 1973–1976, Volume II (Buenos Aires: Norma, 1998).
138. Varlam Chalamov, Mes bibliothèques, trans. Sophie Benech (Paris: Editions Interférences, 1988).
139. “Tiene hijos que lo vieron quemar sus libros,” in Germán García, La fortuna (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 2004).
140. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Don’t Count the Pope among Harry Potter Fans,” in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 16–17 July, 2005).
141. William Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel” a.I.13, in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).
142. Luciano Canfora, La Bibliothèque du Patriarche: Photius censuré dans la France de Mazarin, trans. Luigi-Alberto Sanchi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003).
143. See Leo Löwenthal, “Calibans Erbe,” in Schriften IV (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984).
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