A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
The library as home
The numinous library
She contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves
as she came to them … but the oddest part of it all was that,
whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what
it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though
the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5
FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS, I have lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than ten houses. I chose the place because next to the house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some thirty thousand books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.
My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I did not have a library of some sort. The present library is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I read it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.
One of my earliest memories (I must have been two or three at the time) is of a shelfful of books on the wall above my cot from which my nurse would choose a bedtime story. This was my first library; when I learned to read by myself a year or so later, the shelf, transferred now to safe ground level, be came my private domain. I remember arranging and rearranging my books according to secret rules that I invented for myself: all the Golden Books series had to be grouped together, the fat collections of fairy tales were not allowed to touch the minuscule Beatrix Potters, stuffed animals were not permitted to sit on the same shelf as the books. I told myself that if these rules were upset, terrible things would happen. Superstition and the art of libraries are tightly entwined.
My first library stood in a house in Tel Aviv, where my father was the Argentinean ambassador; my next library grew in Buenos Aires during my adolescence. Before returning to Argentina, my father had asked his secretary to buy enough books to fill the shelves of his library in our new house; obligingly, she ordered cartloads of volumes from a secondhand dealer but found, when trying to place them on the shelves, that many of them wouldn’t fit. Undaunted, she had them trimmed down to size and then bound in deep-green leather, a color which, combined with the dark oak, lent the place the atmosphere of a soft forest. I pilfered books from that library to stock my own, which covered three of the walls in my bedroom. Reading these circumcised books required the extra effort of supplanting the missing bit of every page, an exercise that no doubt trained me to read later the “cut-up” novels of William Burroughs.
The library of my adolescence contained almost every book that still matters to me today; few essential books have been added. Generous teachers, passionate booksellers, friends for whom giving a book was a supreme act of intimacy and trust helped me build it. Their ghosts kindly haunt my shelves, and the books they gave still carry their voices, so that now, when I open Isak Dinesen’s Gothic Tales or Blas de Otero’s early poems, I have the impression not of reading the book myself but of being read to out loud. This is one of the reasons I never feel alone in my library.
I left my books behind when I set off for Europe in 1969, some time before the military dictatorship. I suppose that had I stayed, like so many of my friends, I would have had to destroy my library for fear of the police, since in those terrible days one could be accused of subversion merely for being seen with a book that looked suspicious (someone I knew was arrested as a Communist for carrying with him The Red and the Black). Argentinean plumbers found that there was an unprecedented call for their services, since many readers tried to burn their books in their toilet bowls, causing the porcelain to crack.
In every place I settled, a library began to grow almost on its own. In Paris and in London, in the humid heat of Tahiti, where I worked as a publisher for five long years (my Melville still shows traces of Polynesian mold), in Toronto and in Calgary, I collected books and then, when the time came to leave, packed them up in boxes to wait patiently inside tomblike storage spaces in the uncertain hope of resurrection. Every time I would ask myself how it had happened, this exuberant accumulation of paper and ink that once again would cover my walls like ivy.
The library as it now stands, between long walls whose stones carry in some places the signature of their fifteenth-century masons, houses under a ceiling of weathered beams the remnants of all those previous libraries, including, from my earliest one, Grimm’s Fairy Tales in two volumes, printed in somber Gothic script, and a scribbled copy of The Tailor of Gloucester. There are only a few books that a serious bibliophile would find worthy: an illuminated Bible from a thirteenth-century German scriptorium (a gift from the novelist Yehuda Elberg), half a dozen contemporary artists’ books, a few first editions and signed copies. But I have neither the funds nor the knowledge to become a professional collector, and in my library shiny young Penguins sit happily side by side with severe-looking leather-bound patriarchs.
Because unlike a public library mine requires no common codes that other readers must understand and share, I have organized it simply according to my own requirements and prejudices. A certain zany logic governs its geography. Its major divisions are determined by the language in which the books are written: that is to say, without distinction of genre, all books written originally in Spanish or French, English or Arabic come together on the same shelves. I allow myself, however, many exceptions. Certain subjects — books on the history of the book, biblical studies, versions of the legend of Faust, Renaissance literature and philosophy, gay studies, medieval bestiaries—all have their separate sections. Certain authors are privileged: I have thousands of detective novels but very few spy stories, more Plato than Aristotle, all Zola and hardly any Maupassant, almost all of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick but hardly any of the authors on the New York Times best-seller list. I have dozens of very bad books which I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad. The only book I ever banished from my library was Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which I felt infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain. I put it in the garbage; I didn’t give it to anyone because I wouldn’t give away a book I wasn’t fond of. Nor do I lend books. If I want someone to read a book, I’ll buy a copy and offer it as a gift. I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft.
Like every library, mine will eventually exceed the space allotted to it. Barely seven years after it was set up, it has already spread into the main body of house, which I had hoped to keep free of bookshelves. Travelogues, books on music and film, anthologies of various kinds cover now the walls of several rooms. My detective novels fill one of the guest bedrooms, known now familiarly as the Murder Room. There is a story by Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over,” in which a brother and sister are forced to move from room to room as something unnamed occupies inch by inch their entire house, eventually forcing them out into the street. I foresee a day in which my books, like that anonymous invader, will complete their gradual conquest. I will then be banished to the garden, but, knowing the way of books, I fear that even that seemingly safe place may not be entirely beyond my library’s hungry ambition.