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The 30,000 of Alberto Manguel

by Jamie Grove - How Not To Write on November 27, 2006

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30,000

As a number, most people will stare for a moment and then think, “Wow, that’s a lot of books.” But it isn’t just a lot of books, it’s a quantity of Herculean proportions.

Personally, my library topped out at 5,000 volumes. At the time, I was thinking of starting a bookstore, which is common among people who have so many books and wish to maintain a sense of marital bliss, but that never happened (too much like actual work). I pared down the pile and eventually donated more than 2,500 books to my local library.

To give you a sense of scale, it took three trips to get the books delivered and I have a huge station wagon.

In the November 10th 2006 edition of the TLS, commentator Michael Greenberg attempts to reorganize his own modest library. He then meanders into a discourse with Alberto Manguel, the author of A History of Reading and the literally fantastic Dictionary of Imaginary Places. His latest book is The Library at Night.

Manguel has the mythical 30,000 books mentioned in the first paragraph - and likely far more than that now. Where does he store them? In the fifteenth-century barn on his property in Mondion, France of course. From the publisher’s review:

The Library at Night begins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France - a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits, as well as broader ones about the nature of categories, catalogues, architecture and identity.

Exploring these themes with a deliberately unsystematic brilliance, Manguel takes us to the great Library at Alexandria, and Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence; we sit with Jorge Luis Borges in his office at the National Library in Argentina, travel with donkeys carrying books into the Colombian hinterland, and discover the Fihrist, a chaotic and delightful bibliographic record of medieval Arab knowledge. There seem to be no limits to Manguel’s learning, or his ability to illuminate his investigations with magical, telling details from the past.

The Library at Night is not yet available in the U.S., which is a pity since Manguel is a prophet. However, there are editions available from individual sellers.

“We come into the world as readers, with the impulse to decipher, to find narratives. Stupidity is something that has to be learned.”

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