Customer Reviews
Dull and Lacking in Charm - By: bluecougar25, 15 Aug 2008 
Having been spellbound by A History of Reading, his fascinating & wide-ranging account of how reading has been part of life through the ages, I was pleased to find another work by Manguel on the matter of books,in this case libraries. And it is again wide-ranging & well researched, touching on libraries & book collections & collectors from ancient times to the present day, from mediaeval storerooms to the donkey library service of Columbia, along with many descriptions of Manguel's own library & his clear love affair with books & their keeping.
Ultimately though, I found this a disappointing work, a strange mix of too much detail & too little, too broad a topic & yet too many unimportant facts given; I also didn't find the writing style as enjoyable, this was dry & dull & referred to a dizzying range of works the reader is presumably familiar enough with to have them glossedin a few lines, to little effect. I actually skim read the final few chapters & was quite pleased to discover a large chunk at the end is given over to citations of other works consulted! The division into subtopics made it feel more like a collection of essays, several of which did indeed engage me, but I felt Manguel was trying too hard to make his work up-to-date. I disagree with his views on the Web & the effects of electronic archiving of books & writing - I've had access to a wider range of authors & ideas via Project Gutenberg & online journals than I would ever have managed with traditional libraries, & have read more, not less, as a result.
The flights of fancy he indulgesin about the rustling of pages at night, the secret joy of losing oneselfin a bookish world of dim light & cosiness while the world beyond the window sleeps is a pleasing image to any bibliophile, but his is not the book I would be curled up with, nor recommend to others. A book to browse in, maybe use as a springboard for wider reading but not destined to become an old friend.
The scream of a dying star - By: Mr. O. Buxton, 01 Jul 2008 
Alberto Manguel's The Library At Night is a curious confection: ostensibly a love letter to bookishness, it rejoicesin collections of books & their owners through many prisms; how they're collected, how they can be arranged (as many different ways as you like), how they represent knowledge, time or space - even how the space they occupy can express the personality or idiosyncrasy of their collector.
It will instantly appeal to those, like me, who aspire to have their own "real" library one day (I am hoping mine evolves from its current status as a mere collection of books on a few dusty shelves, though I don't know - & this is one aspect Manguel doesn't delve into - what it takes for a merely juvenile collection of books to matriculate to a mature library).
Manguel also describes libraries through the content of the books they hold, & his range is eclectic, from Greek poets, Arab philosophers & Jewish philanthropists to Anglo-Saxon fantasists like Shelley and, memorably, Stoker. Each new vista builds a new perspective, but curiously after these multiple shafts of light, while one is well illuminated, the general impression is no more specific than that libraries - physical libraries - are pretty neat & we'd be worse off without them.
Which, for a while, made me ponder what the point of the book really was. After all, who could disagree with that?
But then it occurred to me, as surely it did to Manguel, that *we* could,in the same way we've, collectively, disagreed that it's strictly necessary to have a record collection or a even a television any more. Books may not have succumbed quite so easily to the digital ether as did music or film - yet - but there's no reason to suppose that state of affairs is irreversible, & if dear old Amazon would kindly (!) sort out its Kindle supply chain, we might yet shortly see a precipitous decline.
Manguel's subtext is that this would be a frightful outcome. He is certainly more equivocal about digital libraries than he is about physical ones, & sees the advent of the electronic book as a threat to the legitimacy and, possibly, longevity of his bibliophilia. For what good are batty old books, occupying acres of floor-space, however splendid the architecture, when you can have millions of volumes on a portable hard drive?
This issue Manguel only really addresses obliquely, & many of his arguments to counter this position are fatuous (especially as regards the durability of electronic information). The gating issue will be whether les gens can be persuaded to curl up with a Kindle rather than a book. I haven't seen one yet, so I'm yet to be persuaded, & that question alone might save the library's bacon. But otherwise the digital realm solves many of the drawbacks (like an optimistic computer programmer, I suppose he would call them "features") of physical libraries that Manguel documents, such as their physical space & susceptibility to combustion. Such as their inherent need to be ordered one way, no matter how cleverly, to the exclusion of all others. Such as the extreme limitations they impose on the actual retrieval of information (imagine how powerful it would be to be able to Google search the text of an entire library. With a digital library, you can).
All told, Manguel adopts a narrow concept of the value of a library, suitable for dinner parties & night time expeditions, but which won't be familiar to the younger generation who have grown up with Google. Though I am sure he would hotly dispute it, I suspect Manguel would emphasise the space, spirit & idiosyncrasy of a library over its actual, textual content; he would accentuate the intellectual statement a library makes over the intellectual statements contained within it; he would value a book's spine as much as he would the pages bound by it. There is a place for that view - to a certain degree, I share it: I like visitors to my house to see my collection of books, which one day may be a library, & I don't expect them to open any of them.
But when using itin anger, when studying or writing; when I need to quickly find what I am looking for, my physical collection can irritate me intensely. At those points - real ones for genuine scholars, you would think - Manguel's cosy view seems Luddite & hopelessly outdated. For professional library users - as opposed to literate bon vivants - the Google revolution will bring only positive change to what used to be a rather painful & time-consuming endeavour.
Whilst this remains a heartfelt & warmly written elegy, it remains likely that, before long, its subject will be a bygone age. We will have to find new ways to represent our learning. The web is already generating them: perhaps Alberto Manguel should set aside his scepticism & sign up to LibraryThing, & catalogue his books there. Wonders never cease.
Olly Buxton
Every possible thought about libraries - By: A Common Reader, 15 Jun 2008 
The Library At Night is perfect reading for those who enjoy "books about books", or books about the pleasure of reading. After his excellent A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel has now presented us with what is effectively a history of librariesin The Library At Night & the effect is equally as satisfying.
Perhaps "history" is not quite the right word, forin his 15 chapters, Manguel writes of not only the history of libraries, but also the impact & meaning of libraries through the centuries.
Everything is covered here, from the history of the great library of Alexandria to the development of the most modern libraries such as the British Library or the library of the Freie Universität Berlin. The book considers location, cataloguing systems, themes, & great librarians (Gottfreid Leibnitz of Hanover, Andrew Carnegie who created over 2500 libraries, Aby Warburg of Hamburg & many others). But the book is far more than history, containing many digressions on the nature of literature itself, & the process of reading.
At times the book has an almost magical or mystical feel to it. Manguel has created a library of his ownin the Loire Valley, & indeed the title of the book, The Library at Night is derived from his feeling that,
". . .at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts become louder . . . time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness & sleep . . . the books become the real presence & it is I, their reader, who, through cabbalistic rituals of half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up & lured to a certain volume & a certain page".
It is these almost whimsical passages which give the book its charm, for after all, libraries are not merely collections of physical objects, but have atmosphere, cultures, accumulated historical usages which have almost sunk deep into the walls & shelves creating an experience unique to each one.
In the chapter "The Library as Shadow", Manguel covers book-burning & the destruction of libraries. Many times through history, libraries have been destroyed, or at very least whole categories of books have been sent for destruction. Caliph Omar, who issued the order to destroy the Library of Alexandria, had a typical attitude of the fundamentalist,
"If the content of these books agree with the Holy Book, then they are redundant. If they disagree, then they are undesirable. In either case they should be consigned to the flames".
I did not realise that Europeans Catholic leaders destroyed the great libraries of Mexico & Central America, eliminating the histories of the Mayan & Aztec civilisations so that they are forever lost to us. Similarly,in the 16th century, the Ottomans destroyed the Great Corvina Library, said to be one of the jewels of the Hungarian crown. Manguel raises the issue of the American Patriot Law which allows federal agents to obtain records of books borrowed from public libraries, which has caused some libraries to reconsider their acquistion policies. Libraries can be subversive & dangerous to a wide range of governments.
I enjoyed this book greatly. It is beautifully produced by Yale University Press & is richly illustrated with photographs & other drawings. I cannot think how a book on libraries could be more comprehensive, & yet totally readable, & I would recommend it to any lover of books & respecter of the concept of libraries, whether private or public.
