0 Alberto Manguel on.... Reading Aloud

The Library of the Palais Lanckoronski, Vienna (1881) - Rudolph von Alt

"The humanist teacher Battista Guarino, son of the celebrated humanist Guarino Veronese, insisted that readers should not peruse the page silently "or mumble under their breath, for it so often happens that someone who can't hear himself will skip over numerous verses as though he were something else.  Reading out loud is of no small benefit to the understanding, since of course what sounds like a voice from outside makes our ears spur the mind sharply to attention."  According to Guarino, uttering the words even helps the reader's digestion, because it "increases heat and thins the blood, clean out all the veins and opens the arteries, and allows no unnecessary moisture to stand motionless in those vessels which take in and digest food."  Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.179

Detail: Alberto Manguel on.... Reading Aloud

0 Alberto Manguel on...shelving issues

Still Life (The Grey Fan) - Francis Cadell

"Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space.  It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement.  In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.  Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.  This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself."

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.66

Detail: Alberto Manguel on...shelving issues

0 Maguel on... the printed page

Last July I mentioned that I was starting an ongoing series on excerpts from Alberto Manguel's The Library At Night. Well, better late than never, here is the second instalment!  And it's a cheeky riposte to the rise of e-readers, which have (to my mind, rather inexplicably) exploded in popularity since this book was published in 2006.

Restaurant Car (c.1935) by Leonard Campbell Taylor

"Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication.  As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the page, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.  (Columbia University's librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion.  "The value," she wrote, "in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established."  There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading."*

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, pp.74f

*[I would point out that, reading Patricia Battin's Wikipedia page, she is far from a dolt - and has even done a lot for the preservation of physical books, but I still agree with Manguel that what she says here is, to my mind, unsatisfactory.]

Detail: Maguel on... the printed page

0 Manguel on... the Destruction of Books

For a while I've been reading Alberto Manguel's wonderful The Library at Night, given to me by my brother last year.  It's the perfect book to have next to my laptop while I'm writing my thesis - when I need a quite break, rather than browsing Facebook I read a few delightful pages of Manguel.  And, like I did with Stop What You're Doing And Read This, I'm going to be posting quite a few funny, recognisable, thought-provoking, or simply good, excerpts from The Library At Night, along with some paintings I like, preferably of readers (following Harriet's great ongoing series - I may accidentally use pictures which have already featured over there!)  First off is 'Reading Room at Buxton Library' by Robert McLellan-Sim, from the 1930s..

"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, that 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."

--- Alberto Manguel, 'The Library at Night' (p.123)

Detail: Manguel on... the Destruction of Books