Drat the man

It was going to be so wonderful. It would have been thoughtful and erudite, concise yet wide-ranging, a modern classic of academic scholarship. Oh, I had such plans for my dissertation. Not the sort of plans described below, mind you. More like ideas. Or lists of ideas. A bundle of vaguely-defined intentions, anyway. But now that is all for naught, for it turns out that someone has already written my imagined opus and done it so well that further efforts would be pointless.

I’d been meaning to read Alberto Manguel for a while. He writes about books, and about libraries, and also about Jorge Luis Borges (who he used read to in Buenos Aires). Reading his books is the closest I’ll get to living his life, which would really be the ideal scenario. I don’t know exactly what I wanted my dissertation to be about, but I think it would have been a sort of love-letter to libraries and what they mean to me. This is what is lying on the bed in front of me right now, and thank goodness Manguel got there first before I embarrassed myself trying to do justice to the subject.

Solid libraries of wood and paper, or libraries of ghostly flickering screens, stand as proof of our resilient belief in a timeless, far-reaching order that we dimly intuit or perceive. During the Czech insurrection against the Nazis in May 1945, when Russian troops were entering Prague, the librarian Elena Sikorskaja, Vladimir Nabokov’s sister, realized that the German officers now attempting to retreat had not returned several of the books they had borrowed from the library she worked in. She and a colleague decided to reclaim the truant volumes, and set out on a rescue mission through the streets down which the Russian trucks were victoriously advancing. “We reached the house of a German pilot who returned the books quite calmly,” she wrote to her brother a few months later. “But by now they would let no one cross the main road, and everywhere there were Germans with machine guns,” she complained. In the midst of the confusion and the chaos, it seemed important to her that the library’s pathetic attempt at order should, as far as possible, be preserved.

It’s all like that. Over three hundred generously-illustrated pages exmining the library as myth, order, space, power, and a dozen other themes (I quote from the contents page). Even if you don’t care for metaphysics the anecdotes are worth the price of admission. It’s a pity there’s no bibliography, but he rarely quotes from the same work twice so the notes do just as well. Flicking through them even threw up a few surprises.

131. Jean Bottero, Mesapotamie. L’ecriture, la raison et les dieux.
132. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.
133. He was also the celebrated author of a treatise on the prostitutes of Africa.
134. Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas.

It would be inspirational if it weren’t so intimidating. Back to the drawing board for me. Do you think there’s any mileage in the library as restaurant?

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