The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  144. The same story is told by the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, but applied to the Islamic conquest of Persia. According to this version, when General Sa’d ben Waqqas entered the conquered kingdom, he found large numbers of books and asked Omar Ibn al-Kdattab if he should distribute this loot among the faithful. Omar replied, “Throw them into the water! If they hold a guide to the Truth, God has already given us a better one. And if they hold nothing but lies, God will have rid us of them.” That, says Ibn Khaldun, is how we lost the knowledge of the Persians. In Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddima: Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris: Sindbad, 1967–68).

  145. Thanks to Irving Wardle for suggesting this poem by A.D. Hope, in Collected Poems 1930–1970 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972).

  146. William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru (orig. 1843–1847) (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1986).

  147. Jacques Lafaye, Albores de la imprenta: El libro en España y Portugal y sus posesiones de ultramar (siglos XV–XVI) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002). A maravedi was worth 14 shillings.

  148. Richard E. Greenleaf, Zumárraga y la Inquisición mexicana 1536–1543, trans. Victor Villela (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998).

  149. See Miguel León Portilla, El reverso de la conquista (Mexico: Editorial Joaquín Motiz, 1964).

  150. Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y Islas de la Tierra Firme, I: Introduction, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).

  151. Tacitus, Annales, trans. after Burnouf, and annotated by Henri Bornecque (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1965).

  152. Eche, Les bibliothèques arabes publiques et semi-publiques en Mésopotamie.

  153. A large number of the Corvina books were spared because they had been stored in the royal castle of Buda, which the Turks found it unseemly to burn down. See Csaba Csapodi & Klára Csapodi-Gárdonyi, Bibliotheca Corviniana (Budapest: Magyar Helikon, 1967).

  154. Johannes Pedersen, Den Arabiske Bog (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1946).

  155. Le Monde (Paris, 4 September, 1995).

  156. Lawrence Donegan, “Anger as CIA homes in on new target: library users,” in The Observer (London, 16 March, 2003).

  157. Richard F. Tomasson, Iceland: The First New Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).

  158. Joseph Kahn, “Yahoo helped Chinese to prosecute journalist,” in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 8 September, 2005).

  THE LIBRARY AS SHAPE

  159. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1997); Act I.

  160. Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca.

  161. “Un bibliothécaire est toujours un peu architecte. Il bâtit sa collection comme un ensemble à travers lequel le lecteur doit circuler, se reconnaître, vivre.” Melot, La sagesse du bibliothécaire.

  162. Angelo Paredi, A History of the Ambrosiana. trans. Constance and Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame, IN: University Press of Notre Dame, 1983).

  163. Johannes Duft, The Abbey Library of Saint Gall (St. Gallen: Verlag am Klosterhof, 1990).

  164. Simone Balayé, La bibliothèque nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva: Droz, 1988).

  165. The objection was made by Count Léon de Laborde, quoted in Bruno Blasselle and Jacqueline Melet-Sanson, La bibliothèque nationale, mémoire de l’avenir (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

  166. Blasselle and Melet-Sanson, La bibliothèque nationale.

  167. P.R. Harris, The Reading Room (London: The British Library, 1986).

  168. Ibid.

  169. William E. Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  170. H.M. Vaughan, The Medici Popes, Leo X and Clement VII (London: Macmillan, 1908).

  171. Rime e lettere di Michelangelo, ed. P. Mastrocola (Turin: UTET, 1992).

  172. Quoted in Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo.

  173. “Quand’avvien c’alcun legno non difenda/ il proprio umor fuor del terrestre loco,/ non può far c’al gran caldo assai o poco/ non si secchi o non s’arda o non s’accenda.// Così’l cor, tolto da chi mai mel renda,/ vissuto in pianto e nutrito di foco,/ o ch’è fuor del suo proprio albergo e loco,/ qual mal fie che per morte non l’offenda?” in Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, ed. E.N. Girardi (Bari: Laterza, 1960).

  174. Giorgio Vasari, “Michelangelo Buonarroti,” in Lives of the Artists, Vol. I, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987).

  175. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 3d edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1964).

  176. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.

  177. See Kenneth Clark, “The Young Michelangelo,” in J.H. Plumb, The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (London: Collins, 1961).

  178. Luca Pacioli, Divine Proportion (New York: Abaris, 2005).

  THE LIBRARY AS CHANCE

  179. Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet,” in Embarrassments (London: William Heinemann, 1896).

  180. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Travel,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses (London: The Bodley Head, 1896).

  181. Théodore Monod, Méharées (Arles: Actes Sud, 1989).

  182. A.M. Tolba, Villes de sable: Les cités bibliothèques du désert mauritanien (Paris: Hazan, 1999).

  183. Pausanias, Guide to Greece, trans. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971); Vol. II, VI:6.

  184. Jacques Giès and Monique Cohen, “Introduction” to Sérinde, Terre de Bouddha (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995).

  185. Susan Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams (ed.), The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (London: British Library, 2004).

  186. Pieces shown in Giès and Cohen, Sérinde, Terre de Bouddha, and in Whitfield and Sims-Williams, The Silk Road.

  187. Liu Jung-en, ed., introduction to Six Yuan Plays (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972).

  188. Mark Aurel Stein, Serindia, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921).

  189. Quoted in Whitfield and Sims-Williams, The Silk Road.

  THE LIBRARY AS WORKSHOP

  190. Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig W. Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  191. Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997).

  192. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London, 1878).

  193. Cicero, “Cicero to Atticus, April 59,” in Selected Letters, trans. D.R. Shackelton Bailey (London: Penguin, 1986).

  194. “Cicero to Atticus, 10 March 45,” ibid.

  195. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: The Hogarth Press, 1929).

  196. N. Sanz and Ruiz de la Peña, La Casa de Cervantes en Valladolid (Valladolid: Fundaciones Vega-Inclán, 1993).

  197. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Celina S. de Cortazar and Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1969); I:VI.

  198. Jorge Luis Borges, “Poema de los dones,” in El hacedor (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960).

  199. Jorge Luis Borges, “Autobiographical notes,” in The New Yorker (New York, 19 September, 1970).

  200. Borges, “Al iniciar el estudio de la gramática anglosajona,” in El hacedor.

  201. Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca.

  202. William Blake, “Milton,” Pl.35, 42–45 in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).

  203. Badr al-Din Muhammed Ibn Jama’a, Tadhkirat al-sami,’ quoted in Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo.

  204. Nasir al-Din Tusi, Risala, ibid.

  205. Quoted in Robert Irwin, Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1999).


  THE LIBRARY AS MIND

  206. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Literary Works of Machiavelli, ed. John Hale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

  207. Philippe Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort ven occident: du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

  208. Revelation 20:12.

  209. See Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo.

  210. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, Hildesheim, 1981, quoted in Salvatore Settis, “Warburg continuatus,” in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques: La mémoire des livres en Occident, ed. Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).

  211. Ernst Cassirer, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,” in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, I, 1921–1922 (Leipzig & Berlin, 1923).

  212. “Ein kleiner Herr mit schwarzem Schnurrbart der manchmal Dialektgeschichten erzählt,” quoted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970). I have revised Gombrich’s English translation.

  213. “dadurch offenbar das Mittel gefunden, mich von einer erschütternden Gegenwart, die mich wehrlos machte, abzuziehen…. Die Schmerzempfindung reagierte sich ab in der Fantasie des Romantisch- Grausamen. Ich machte da die Schutzimpfung gegen das aktiv Grausame durch …,”in Aby Warburg, Notes for Lecture on Serpent Ritual, 1923, pp. 16–18, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  214. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (New York: Random House, 1993).

  215. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, II:8 in Goethes Werke, Band IX, Autobiographische Schriften I, Ed. Liselotte Blumenthal (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1994).

  216. Ernst Cassirer, “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften.”

  217. As Gombrich notes.

  218. “Das Gedächtnis als organisierte Materie,” in Ewald Hering, Über das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Lecture, Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna, 30 May, 1870), 3 ed. (Leipzig, 1921).

  219. The story of the controversy is told by Salvatore Settis in “Warburg continuatus,” in Quaderni storici, 58/a XX, no. 1, (April 1985).

  220. Fritz Saxl, “The History of Warburg’s Library (1886–1944),” appendix to Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  221. “Aalsuppenstil,”quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  222. Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Princip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens, 2d ed. (Leipzig: W. Engelman, 1908).

  223. “Gespenstergeschichte für ganz Erwachsene.” Aby Warburg, Grundbegriffe, I, p.3, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  224. “das Nachleben der Antike,” quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  225. “Wie ein Seismograph hatten seine empfindlichen Nerven die unterirdischen Erschütterungen schon dann verzeichnet, als andere sie noch völlig überhörten.” Carl Georg Heise, in Persönliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg (Hamburg: Gesellschaft der Bücherfreunde, 1959).

  226. “Du lebst und tust mir nichts.”

  227. “Die Wiederbelebung der dämonischen Antike vollzieht sich dabei, wie wir sahen, durch eine Art polarer Funktion des einfühlenden Bildgedächtnisses. Wir sind im Zeitalter des Faust, wo sich der moderne Wissenschaftler—zwischen magischer Praktik und kosmologischer Mathematik—den Denkraum der Besonnenheit zwischen sich und dem Objekt zu erringen versuchte.” Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, II:534, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  228. I’m grateful to Professor W.F. Blisset for this information.

  229. “warum das Schicksal den schöpferischen Menschen in die Region der ewigen Unruhe verweist, ihm überlassend ob er seine Bildung im Inferno, Purgatorio oder Paradiso findet.” Aby Warburg, in Schlussübung, Notebook 1927–28, pp. 68–69, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  230. Aby Warburg, Le rituel du serpent: récit d’un voyage en pays pueblo, introduction by Joseph Leo Koerner, text by Fritz Saxl and de Benedetta Cestelli Guidi, trans. Sibylle Muller, Philip Guiton and Diane H. Bodart (Paris: Macula, 2003).

  231. “Die Bilder und Worte sollen für die Nachkommenden eine Hilfe sein bei dem Versuch der Selbstbesinnung zur Abwehr der Tragik der Gespanntheit zwischen triebhafter Magie und auseinandersetzender Logik. Die Konfession eines (unheilbaren) Schizoiden, den Seelenärtzen ins Archiv gegeben.” Aby Warburg, Note 7, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

  232. “Annahme des Kunstwerkes als etwas in Richtung auf den Zuschauer feindlich Bewegtes.” Aby Warburg, in Fragmente (27 August, 1890).

  THE LIBRARY AS ISLAND

  233. See William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  234. W. Jaeger, Aristotle, trans. R. Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).

  235. Plato, “Phaedrus,” trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

  236. “They read your will: they choose it to be theirs: they cherish it. They read it without cease and what they read never passes away. For it is your own unchanging purpose that they read, choosing to make it their own and cherishing it for themselves.” Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by and with an introduction by R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961); Book XIII:15.

  237. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, no. 838 in Goethes Werke, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1981); Vol. XII.

  238. Ecclesiastes 12:12.

  239. Adolfo Bioy Casares, “Libros y amistad,” in La otra aventura (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1968).

  240. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  241. Nicholas de Cusa, “De docta ignorantia,” in Selected Spiritual Writings, translated and introduced by H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 2005).

  242. Julie Flaherty, “New Testament on a Chip,” in The New York Times (New York, 23 June, 2003).

  243. Announced on the BBC evening news, 26 May, 2003.

  244. The Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book II, chapter XIII, in Opera Historica, Vol. I, ed. J.E. King (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann Ltd, 1971).

  245. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996).

  246. Walter Benjamin, Schriften, edited by and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955).

  247. The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 18 January, 1999).

  248. Will Eisner, interview on France Info Radio, broadcast 19 December, 2004.

  249. Paul Duguid, “PG Tips,” in The Times Literary Supplement (London, 11 June, 2004).

  250. Garrick Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians (Washington, 1893).

  251. “Mucho más que libros,” Semana (Bogotá, 4 June, 2001).

  252. Personal interview, Bogotá, 25 May, 2001.

  253. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York and Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980).

  THE LIBRARY AS SURVIVAL

  254. Tuvia Borzykowski, Ben kirot noflim, trans. Mosheh Basok (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbuts ha-Meuhad, 1964).

  255. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).

  256. Quoted in Friedman, “The Fate of the Jewish Book,” in Roads to Extinction.

  257. Donald E. Collins and Herbert P. Rothfeder, “The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and the Looting of Jewish and Masonic Libraries During World War II,” in Journal of Library History 18, 1983.

  258. Founded by the exiled son-in-law of Samuel Fischer, the celebrated German publisher.

  259. Quoted in Friedman, “The Fate of the Jewish Book,” in Roads to Extinction.

  260. Nili Keren, “The Family Camp” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Birnbaum (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), quoted in David Shav
it, Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 1997).

  261. Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word.

  262. “Mensh, oyf tsu shraybn geshikhte darf men hobn a kop un nisht keyn tukhes,” quoted in Yitzhak Zuckerman, “Antek,” in A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. and ed. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

  263. Quoted in Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word.

  264. Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

  265. Moshe Kligsberg, “Die yidishe yugent-bavegnung in Polyn tsvishn bey de vel-milkhumes (a sotsyologishe shtudie),” in Studies in Polish Jewry 1919–1939, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1974).

  266. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (London: Heinemann, 1948).

  267. Diary of Johann Paul Kremer (entry for 2 September, 1942), ed. Kazimierz Smolen, in KL Auschwitz seen by the SS, second edition (O’swieçim, 1978), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (London: William Collins, 1986).

  268. Martin Buber, Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Frankfurt am Main: Manesse Verlag, 1949).

  269. Victor Hugo, Inferi: La légende des siècles (Paris, 1883).

  270. Romain Gary, La danse de Genghis Cohn (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

  271. Nunca Más: A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People (London and Boston: Faber & Faber in association with Index on Censorship, 1986).

  272. Amin Maalouf, Les croisades vues par les Arabes (Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1983).

  273. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000).

  274. Dante, Inferno, XXXIV, 129–132.

  275. Quoted in Gilbert, The Holocaust.

  THE LIBRARY AS OBLIVION

  276. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1974).