Library at Night

Alberto Manguo

The 1 ji brai y al Nidi I

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PAGES II/III: Aby Warburg's Library, Hamburg, Germany

First published in Canada in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. First published in the United States in 2008 by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2006 Alberto Manguel. All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Permission to reprint "The Mayan Books" by A.D. Hope from The Collected Poems 1930-1970, Angus & Robertson, 1972, granted by arrangement with the Licensor, c/o Curtis Brown (Aust.) Pty. Ltd.

Pages 357-360 constitute a continuation of the copyright page. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937419 ISBN 978-0-300-13914-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman poet Adbullatif felebi, better known as Latifi, called each of the books in his library "a true and loving friend who drives away all cares."

This book is for Craig.

Contents

Foreword

2

The Library as Myth

6

The Library as Order

36

The Library as Space

64

The Library as Power

9⁰

The Library as Shadow

106

The Library as Shape

128

The Library as Chance

162

The Library as Workshop

176

The Library as Mind

192

The Library as Island

214

The Library as Survival

234

The Library as Oblivion

252

The Library as Imagination

268

The Library as Identity

292

The Library as Home

306

Conclusion

320

Acknowledgments

326

Notes

329

Image Credits

357

Index 361

All that remains of an Athenian library: an inscription stating that opening times are "from the first to the sixth hour" and that "it is forbidden to take works out of the library."

FOREWORD

This roving humor (though not with like success) I have ever had, & like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird it sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly (for who is everywhere is nowhere) . . . , that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgement.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

The starting point is a question.

Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we'd like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure.

Why then do we do it? Though I knew from the start that the question would most likely remain unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile for its own sake. This book is the story of that quest.

Less keen on the tidy succession of dates and names than on our endless collecting efforts, I set off several years ago, not to compile another history of libraries nor to add another tome to the alarmingly extensive collec­tion of bibliotechnology, but merely to give an account of my astonishment. "Surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson over a century ago, "that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour."¹

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books. I feel an adventurous pleasure in losing myself among the crowded stacks, superstitiously confident that any established hierarchy of letters or numbers will lead me one day to a promised destination. Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. "A big library," mused Northrop Frye in one of his many notebooks, "really has the gift of tongues & vast potencies of tele­pathic communication."²

Under such agreeable delusions, I've spent half a cen­tury collecting books. Immensely generous, my books make no demands on me but offer all kinds of illumina­tions. "My library," wrote Petrarch to a friend, "is not an unlearned collection, even if it belongs to someone unlearned."³ Like Petrarch's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse this privilege.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror—at the clutter or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance—and some of that over­whelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, the natives found friendly.

In my foolhardy youth, when my friends were dream­ing of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. Sloth and an ill-restrained fondness for travel decided otherwise. Now, however, having reached the age of fifty-six (which, according to Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, is "the age at which real life can be rightly said to begin"), I've returned to that early ideal and, though I cannot properly call myself a librarian, I live among ever-increasing bookshelves whose limits begin to blur or coincide with the house itself. The title of this book should have been Voyage around My Room. Regrettably, over two centuries ago, the notorious Xavier de Maistre got there first.

albertq manguel, 30 January 2005

THE LIBRARY

AS MYTH

Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order.

Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus

The library in which I have at long last collected my books began life as a barn sometime in the fifteenth cen­tury, perched on a small hill south of the Loire. Here, in the last years before the Christian era, the Romans erected a temple to Dionysus to honour the god of this wine-producing area; twelve centuries later, a Christian church replaced the god of drunken ecstasy with the god who turned his blood into wine. (I have a picture of a stained-glass window showing a Dionysian grapevine growing out of the wound in Christ's right side.) Still later, the villagers attached to the church a house to lodge their priest, and eventually added to this presby­tery a couple of pigeon towers, a small orchard and a barn. In the fall of 2000, when I first saw these buildings which are now my home, all that was left of the barn was a single stone wall that separated my property from a chicken run and the neighbour's field. According to vil­lage legend, before belonging to the barn, the wall was

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OPPOSITE TOP: The library of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: The library at Le Presbytere.

part of one of the two castles that Tristan L'Hermite, minister of Louis xi of France and notorious for his cru­elty, built for his sons around 1433. The first of these cas­tles still stands, much altered during the eighteenth century. The second burnt down three or four centuries ago, and the only wall left standing, with a pigeon tower attached to its far end, became the property of the church, bordering one side of the presbytery garden. In 1693, after a new cemetery was opened to house the increasing number of dead, the inhabitants of the village ("gathered outside the church doors," says the deed) granted the incumbent priest permission to incorporate the old cemetery and to plant fruit trees over the emptied tombs. At the same time, the castle wall was used to enclose a new barn. After the French Revolution, war, storms and neglect caused the barn to crumble, and even after services resumed in the church in 1837 and a new priest came to live in the presbytery, the barn was not

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ABOVE: The stained-glass window in Chinon depicting Christ as the life-giving vine.

OPPOSITE: The Long Hall library at Sissinghurst.

rebuilt. The ancient wall continued to serve as a property divider, looking onto a farmer's field on one side and shading the presbytery's magnolia tree and bushes of hydrangea on the other.⁴

As soon as I saw the wall and the scattered stones around it, I knew that here was where I would build the room to house my books. I had in mind a distinct picture of a library, something of a cross between the long hall at Sissinghurst (Vita Sackville-West's house in Kent, which I had recently visited) and the library of my old high school, the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I wanted a room panelled in dark wood, with soft pools of light and comfortable chairs, and an adjacent, smaller space in which I'd set up my writing desk and reference books. I imagined shelves that began at my waist and went up only as high as the fingertips of my stretched- out arm, since, in my experience, the books condemned to heights that require ladders, or to depths that force the reader to crawl on his stomach on the floor, receive far less attention than their middle-ground fellows, no mat­ter their subject or merit. But these ideal arrangements would have required a library three or four times the size of the vanished barn and, as Stevenson so mournfully put it, "that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect,

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and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes."⁵ Out of necessity, my library has shelves that begin just above the baseboards and end an octavo away from the beams of the watershed ceiling.

While the library was being built, the masons discov­ered two windows in the old wall that had been bricked up long ago. One is a slim embrasure from which archers perhaps defended Tristan l'Hermite's son when his angry peasants revolted; the other is a low square win­dow protected by medieval iron bars cut roughly into stems with drooping leaves. From these windows, during the day, I can see my neighbour's chickens hurry from one corner of the compound to another, pecking at this spot and at that, driven frantic by too many offerings, like demented scholars in a library; from the windows on the new wall opposite, I look out onto the presbytery itself and the two ancient sophora trees in my garden. But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence. To someone standing outside, in the garden, the library at night appears like a vast vessel of some sort, like that strange Chinese villa that, in 1888, the capricious Empress Cixi caused to be built in the shape of a ship marooned in the garden lake of her Summer Palace. In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

During the day, the library is a realm of order. Down and across the lettered passages I move with visible pur­pose, in search of a name or a voice, summoning books to my attention according to their allotted rank and file.

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The marble boat palace ofEmpress Cixi.

The structure of the place is visible: a maze of straight lines, not to become lost in but for finding; a divided room that follows an apparently logical sequence of clas­sification; a geography obedient to a predetermined table of contents and a memorable hierarchy of alphabets and numbers.

But at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts grow louder. "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva take flight," noted Walter Benjamin, quoting Hegel.⁶ Time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness and sleep in which the world can be comfortably reimagined. My movements feel unwittingly furtive, my activity secret. I turn into something of a ghost. The books are now the real presence and it is I, their reader, who, through cab­balistic rituals of half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up and lured to a certain volume and a certain page. The order decreed by library catalogues is, at night, merely conventional; it holds no prestige in the shadows. Though my own library has no authoritarian catalogue, even such milder orders as alphabetical arrangement by author or division into sections by language find their power diminished. Free from quotidian constraints, unobserved in the late hours, my eyes and hands roam recklessly across the tidy rows, restoring chaos. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.

In the first century a.d., in his book on the Roman civil war that had taken place a hundred years earlier, Lucan described Julius Caesar wandering through the ruins of Troy and remarked how every cave and every barren wood reminded his hero of the ancient Homeric stories. "A legend clings to every stone,"⁷ Lucan explained, describing both Caesar's narrative-filled jour­ney and, far in the future, the library in which I am now sitting. My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgot­ten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. No doubt these stories exist on the page equally during the day but, perhaps because of nighttime's acquaintance with phantom appearances and telltale dreams, they become more vividly present after the sun has set. I walk down the aisles glimpsing the works of Voltaire and hear in the dark the oriental fable of Zadig; somewhere in the distance William Beckford's Vathek picks up the thread of the story and hands it over to Salman Rushdie's clowns behind the blue covers of The Satanic Verses; another Orient is echoed in the mag­ical twelfth-century village of Zahiri of Samarkand, which in turn relinquishes the telling to Naguib Mahfouz's sorrowful survivors in present-day Egypt. Lucan's Caesar is told to walk carefully in the Trojan landscape lest he tread on ghosts. At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

And yet, the library at night is not for every reader. Michel de Montaigne, for instance, disagreed with my gloomy preference. His library (he spoke of librairie, not bibliotheque, since the use of these words was just begin­ning to change in the vertiginous sixteenth century) was housed on the third floor of his tower, in an ancient stor­age space. "I spend there most of the days of my life and most of the hours of the day; I am never there at night,"⁸ he confessed. At night Montaigne slept, since he believed that the body suffered enough during the day for the sake of the reading mind. "Books have many pleasant qualities for those who know how to choose them, but there is no good without effort; it is not a plain and pure pleasure, not more so than others; it has its discomforts, and they are onerous; the soul disports itself, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten, remains inactive, and grows weary and sad."⁹

Not mine. The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that, when I finally decide

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Montaigne's Tower.

to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed. I've learned from long experience that if I want to write on a certain subject in the morning, my reading on that subject at night will feed my dreams not only with the arguments but with the actual events of the story. Reading about Mrs. Ramsay's boeufen daube makes me hungry, Petrarch's ascension of Mount Ventoux leaves me breathless, Keats's account of his swimming invigor­ates me, the last pages of Kim fill me with loving friend­ship, the first description of the Baskervilles' hound makes me look uneasily over my shoulder. For Coleridge, such recollections elicit in a reader the loftiest of all possi­ble sensations, the sense of the sublime, which, he says, "arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it; not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex."¹⁰ Coleridge dismisses the "sensuous impression" too readily; in order for these nightly imaginations to flourish, I must allow my other senses to awaken—to see and touch the pages, to hear the crinkle and the rustle of the paper and the fearful crack of the spine, to smell the wood of the shelves, the musky perfume of the leather bindings, the acrid scent of my yellowing pocket books. Then I can sleep.

During the day, I write, browse, rearrange books, put away my new acquisitions, reshuffle sections for the sake of space. Newcomers are made welcome after a period of inspection. If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow- travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stick­ers would be condemned.

During the night, I sit and read, and watch the rows of books tempting me again to establish connections between neighbours, to invent common histories for them, to associate one recalled snippet with another. Virginia Woolf once tried to distinguish between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading and concluded that "there is no connection whatever between the two." "A learned man," she wrote,

is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.¹¹

During the day, the concentration and system tempt me; at night I can read with a lightheartedness verging on insouciance.

Day or night, however, my library is a private realm, very unlike public libraries large and small, and also unlike the phantom electronic library of whose univer­sality I remain a moderate sceptic. The geography and customs of the three are different in different ways, even though all have in common the explicit will to lend con­cord to our knowledge and imagination, to group and to parcel information, to assemble in one place our vicari­ous experience of the world, and to exclude many other readers' experiences through parsimony, ignorance, inca­pability or fear.

So constant and far-reaching are these seemingly contradictory attempts at inclusion and exclusion that (at least in the West) they have their distinct literary emblems, two monuments that, it could be said, stand for everything we are. The first, erected to reach the unreachable heavens, rose from our desire to conquer space, a desire punished by the plurality of tongues that even today lays daily obstacles against our attempts at making ourselves known to one another. The second, built to assemble, from all over the world, what those tongues had tried to record, sprang from our hope to vanquish time, and ended in a legendary fire that con­sumed even the present. The Tower of Babel in space and the Library of Alexandria in time are the twin sym­bols of these ambitions. In their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the volumes of Alexandria.

The story of Babel is told in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. After the Flood, the people of the earth jour­neyed east to the land of Shi'nar, and there decided to build a city and a tower that would reach into the heav­ens. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one lan­guage; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their lan­guage, that they may not understand one another's speech."¹² God, the legend tells us, invented the multi­plicity of languages in order to prevent us from working together, so we would not overreach our powers. According to the Sanhedrin (a council of Jewish elders set up in Jerusalem in the first century), the place where the tower once rose never lost its peculiar quality and, even today, whoever passes it forgets all he knows.¹³

The building of the Tower of Babel depicted in an English illustrated manuscript of the Book ofGenesis, circa 1390.

Years ago, I was shown a small hill of rubble outside the walls of Babylon and told that this was all that remained of what had once been Babel.

The Library of Alexandria was a learning centre set up by the Ptolemaic kings at the end of the third cen­tury B.C. better to follow the teachings of Aristotle. According to the Greek geographer Strabo,¹⁴ writing in the first century B.C., the library may have contained the philosopher's own books, left to one of his disciples, Theophrastus, who in turn bequeathed them to another, Neleus of Scepsis, who eventually became involved in the establishment of the library. Up until the founding of the Library of Alexandria, the libraries of the ancient world were either private collections of one man's read­ings, or government storehouses where legal and literary documents were kept for official reference. The impulse for setting up these earlier libraries was one less of curiosity than of safekeeping, and stemmed from the

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need for specific consultation rather than from the desire to be all-embracing. The Library of Alexandria revealed a new imagination that outdid all existing libraries in ambition and scope. The Attalid kings of Pergamum, in northwestern Asia Minor, attempted to compete with Alexandria and built a library of their own, but it never achieved the grandeur of that of Alexandria. To prevent their rivals from creating manuscripts for their library, the Ptolemies banned the exportation of papyrus, to which the Pergamum librarians responded by inventing a new writing material which was given the city's name: pergamenon, or parchment.¹⁵

A curious document from the second century B.C., the perhaps apocryphal Letter of Aristeas, records a story about the origins of the Library of Alexandria that is emblematic of its colossal dream. In order to assemble a universal library (says the letter), King Ptolemy I wrote "to all the sovereigns and governors on earth" begging them to send to him every kind of book by every kind of author, "poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all oth­ers too." The king's scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required if they were to collect in Alexandria "all the books of all the peoples of the world."¹⁶ (Time magnifies our ambitions; in 1988, the Library of Congress in Washington alone was receiving that number of items a year, from which it sparingly kept about four hundred thousand.)¹⁷ Today, the Library of Alexandria has been rebuilt by the Egyptian government following a design competition won by the Norwegian architectural studio Sn0hetta. Costing US$220 million, rising thirty-two metres high

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The new Library of Alexandria, whose first stone was laid in 1988.

and encompassing a circumference of 160 metres, with enough shelf space to hold over eight million volumes, the new Library of Alexandria will also house audio­visual material and virtual collections in its capacious rooms.¹⁸

The Tower of Babel stood (while it stood) as proof of our belief in the unity of the universe. According to the story, in the growing shadow of Babel humankind inhabited a world with no linguistic borders, believing heaven to be as much within its rights as solid earth. The Library of Alexandria (on ground firmer perhaps than that of Babel) rose to prove the contrary, that the uni­verse was of a bewildering variety and that this variety possessed a secret order. The first reflected our intuition of a single, continuous, monolingual divinity whose words were spoken by all from earth to heaven; the sec­ond, the belief that each of the books made up of these words was its own complex cosmos, each presuming in its singularity to address the whole of creation. The Tower of Babel collapsed in the prehistory of story­telling; the Library of Alexandria rose when stories took on the shape of books, and strove to find a syntax that would lend each word, each tablet, each scroll its illumi­nating and necessary place. Indistinct, majestic, ever- present, the tacit architecture of that infinite Library continues to haunt our dreams of universal order. Nothing like it has ever again been achieved, though other libraries (the Web included) have tried to copy its astonishing ambition. It stands unique in the history of the world as the only place which, having set itself up to record everything, past and future, might also have fore­seen and stored the chronicle of its own destruction and resurrection.

Divided into thematic areas by categories devised by its librarians, the Library of Alexandria became a multi­tude of libraries, each insistent on one aspect of the world's variety. Here (the Alexandrians boasted) was a place where memory was kept alive, where every written thought had its niche, where each reader could find his own itinerary traced line after line in books perhaps yet unopened, where the universe itself found its worded reflection. As a further measure to accomplish his ambi­tion, King Ptolemy decreed that any book arriving in the port of Alexandria was to be seized and copied, with the solemn promise that the original would be returned (like so many solemn kingly promises, this one was not always kept, and often it was the copy that was handed back). Because of this despotic measure, the books assembled in the Library became known as "the ships' collection."¹⁹

The first reference to the Library is by Herodas, a poet from Cos or Miletus who lived in the second half of the third century B.C., in a text that mentions a building known as the Museion, or House of the Muses, that almost certainly lodged the famous Library. Curiously, in a dizzying game of Chinese boxes, Herodas lends the kingdom of Egypt an all-englobing universal-library nature, so that Egypt includes the Museum, which in turn includes the Library, which in turn includes everything:

And [Egypt] resembles the house of Aphrodite:

Everything that exists and everything that is possible

Is found in Egypt: money, games, power, the blue sky above,

Fame, spectacles, philosophers, gold, young men and maidens,

The temple of the sibling gods, the benevolent king,

The Museum, wine and whatever else one might imagine.²⁰

Unfortunately, in spite of passing references like this one, the truth is that we don't know what the Library of Alexandria looked like. We have an image of the Tower of Babel, probably inspired by the ninth-century spiral minaret of the Abu Dulaf mosque in Samarra and ren­dered in dozens of paintings, mainly by sixteenth- century Dutch artists such as Breughel: a snail-like, unfinished building crawling with industrious workers. We have no familiar image, however fantastical, of the Library of Alexandria.

The Italian scholar Luciano Canfora, after surveying all the sources available to us, concludes that the Library itself must have consisted of a very long, high hall or passageway in the Museion. Along its walls were endless bibliothekai, a term which originally designated not the room but the shelves or niches for the scrolls. Above the shelves there was an inscription: "The place of the cure of the soul." On the other side of the bibliothekai walls were a number of rooms, used perhaps by the scholars as residences or meeting places. There was also a room for communal meals.

The Museion stood in the royal neighbourhood, by the seafront, and provided bed and board to scholars invited to the Ptolemaic court. According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C., Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It was situated in the south­western neighbourhood of Alexandria, close to the tem­ple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion library's holdings.

It is infuriating not to be able to tell what the Library of Alexandria looked like. With understandable hubris, every one of its chroniclers (all those whose testimony has reached us) seems to have thought its description superfluous. The Greek geographer Strabo, a contempo­rary of Diodorus, described the city of Alexandria in detail but, mysteriously, failed to mention the Library. "The Museion too forms part of the royal buildings and comprises a peripatos [deambulatory], an exedra with seats, and a large building housing the common room where scholars who are members of the Museion take their meals,"²¹ is all he tells us. "Why need I even speak of it, since it is imperishably held in the memory of all men?" wrote Athenaeus of Naucratis, barely a century and a half after its destruction. The Library that wanted to be the storehouse for the memory of the world was not able to secure for us the memory of itself. All we know of it, all that remains of its vastness, its marbles and its scrolls, are its various raisons d'etre.

One forceful reason was the Egyptian pursuit of immortality. If an image of the cosmos can be assembled and preserved under a single roof (as King Ptolemy must have thought), then every detail of that image—a grain of sand, a drop of water, the king himself—will have a place there, recorded in words by a poet, a storyteller, a historian, forever, or at least as long as there are readers who may one day open the appointed page. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured. The heroes of Virgil, of Herman Melville, of Joseph Conrad, of most epic literature, embrace this Alexandrian belief. For them, the world (like the Library) is made up of myriad stories that, through tangled mazes, lead to a revelatory moment set up for them alone—even if in that last moment the reve­lation itself is denied, as Kafka's pilgrim realizes, stand­ing outside the Gates of Law (so oddly reminiscent of library gates) and finding in the instant of dying that "they are to be closed forever, because they were meant for you alone."²² Readers, like epic heroes, are not guar­anteed an epiphany.

In our time, bereft of epic dreams—which we 've re­placed with dreams of pillage—the illusion of immortality is created by technology. The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travellers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's out­standing qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. Like the sea, the Web is volatile: 70 per­cent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present—which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell.²³ Alexandria and its scholars, by contrast, never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

But the Library of Alexandria was set up to do more than merely immortalize. It was to record everything that had been and could be recorded, and these records were to be digested into further records, an endless trail of readings and glosses that would engender in turn new glosses and new readings. It was to be a readers' work­shop, not just a place where books were endlessly pre­served. To ensure its use, the Ptolemies invited the most celebrated scholars from many countries—such as Euclid and Archimedes—to take up residence in Alexandria, paying them a handsome retainer and not demanding anything in exchange except that they make use of the Library's treasures.²⁴ In this way, these specialized read­ers could each become acquainted with a large number of texts, reading and summing up what they had read, producing critical digests for future generations who would then reduce these readings to further digests. A satire from the third century B.C. by Timon of Phlius describes these scholars as charakitai, "scribblers," and says that "in the populous land of Egypt, many well-fed charakitai scribble on papyrus while squabbling inces­santly in the Muses' cage."²⁵

In the second century, and as a result of the Alexan­drian summaries and collations, an epistemological rule for reading was firmly established, decreeing that "the most recent text replaces all previous ones, since it is sup­posed to contain them."²⁶ Following this exegesis and closer to our time, Stephane Mallarme suggested that "the world was made to conclude in a handsome book,"²⁷ that is to say, in a single book, any book, a distillation or summing-up of the world that must encompass all other books. This method proceeds by foreshadowing certain books, as the Odyssey foresees the adventures of Holden Caulfield, and the story of Dido foretells that of Madame Bovary, or by echoing them, as the sagas of Faulkner hold the destinies of the House of Atreus, and the pere­grinations of Jan Morris pay homage to the voyages of Ibn Khaldun.

This intuition of associative readings allowed the librarians of Alexandria to establish complex literary genealogies, and later readers to recognize, in the most trivial accounts of a hero's life (Tristram Shandy or The Confessions ofZeno) or in the most fantastical nightmares (of Sadegh Hedayat or Julio Cortazar), a description of the universe at large, and of their own triumphs and tribu­lations. In any of the pages of any of my books may lie a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. As the librarians of Alexandria perhaps discovered, any single literary moment necessarily implies all others.

But more than anything else, the Library of Alexan­dria was a place of memory, of necessarily imperfect memory. "What memory has in common with art," wrote Joseph Brodsky in 1985,

is the knack for selection, the taste for detail. Complimentary though this observation may seem to art (that of prose in particu­lar), to memory it should appear insulting. The insult, however, is well deserved. Memory contains precisely details, not the whole picture; highlights, if you will, not the entire show. The conviction that we are somehow remembering the whole thing in a blanket fashion, the very conviction that allows the species to go on with its life, is groundless. More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.²⁸

Honouring Alexandria's remote purpose, all subsequent libraries, however ambitious, have acknowledged this piecemeal mnemonic function. The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condi­tion through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consists of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria. Accordingly, centuries later, when a mon­ument was suggested to honour the victims of the Holocaust in Germany, the most intelligent proposal (unfortunately not chosen) was to build a library.²⁹

And yet, as a public space the Library of Alexandria was a paradox, a building set aside for an essentially pri­vate craft (reading) which now was to take place com­munally. Under the Library's roof, scholars shared an illusion of freedom, convinced that the entire reading realm was theirs for the asking. In fact, their choice was censored in a number of ways: by the stack (open or closed) on which the book sat, by the section of the library in which it had been catalogued, by privileged notions of reserved rooms or special collections, by gen­erations of librarians whose ethics and tastes had shaped the collection, by official guidelines based on what Ptolemaic society considered "proper" or "valuable," by bureaucratic rulings whose reasons were lost in the dun­geons of time, by considerations of budget and size and availability.

The Ptolemies and their librarians were certainly aware that memory was power. Hecateus of Abdera, in his semi-fictional book of travels, the Egyptiaca, had claimed that Greek culture owed its existence to Egypt, whose culture was more ancient and morally far supe­rior.³⁰ Mere assertion was not enough, and the librarians of Alexandria dutifully set up a vast collection of Greek works to confirm the debt of these to Egyptian authority. Not just Greek; through the collection of books of vari­ous pasts, the librarians hoped to grant their readers knowledge of the interwoven roots and branches of human culture, which (as Simone Weil was much later to declare) can be defined as "the formation of attention."³¹ For this purpose, they trained themselves to become attentive to the world beyond their borders, gathering and interpreting information, ordering and cataloguing all manner of books, seeking to associate different texts and to transform thought by association.

By housing as many books as possible under one sin­gle roof, the librarians of Alexandria also tried to protect them from the risk of destruction that might result if left in what were deemed to be less caring hands (an argu­ment adopted by many Western museums and libraries today). Therefore, as well as being an emblem of man's power to act through thought, the Library became a monument intended to defeat death, which, as poets tell us, puts an end to memory.

And yet, in spite of all the concern of its rulers and librarians, the Library of Alexandria vanished. Just as we know almost nothing of the shape it had when it was erected, we know nothing certain about its disappear­ance, sudden or gradual. According to Plutarch, during Julius Caesar's stay in Alexandria in 47 b.c. a fire spread from the Arsenal and "put an end to the great Library," but his account is faulty. Other historians (Dio Cassius and Orosius, drawing their information from Livy and from Caesar's own De bello alexandrino) suggested that Caesar's fire destroyed not the Library itself but some forty thousand volumes stored near the Arsenal, where they were possibly awaiting shipment to Rome. Almost seven centuries later, another possible ending was offered. A Christian chronicle, drawn from the Ta'rikh al-Hukuma or Chronicle ofWise Men by Ibn al-Kifti and now discredited, blamed the destruction on the Muslim general Amr ibn al-As, who, upon entering Alexandria in a.d. 642, was supposed to have ordered Caliph Omar I to set fire to the contents of the Library. The books, always according to the Christian narrator, were used to feed the stoves of the public baths; only the works of Aristotle were spared.³²

Historically, in the light of day, the end of the Library remains as nebulous as its true aspect; historically, the Tower, if it ever existed, was nothing but an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate enterprise. As myths, however, in the imagination at night, the solidity of both buildings is unimpeachable. We can admire the mythical Tower ris­ing visibly to prove that the impossible is worth attempt­ing, no matter how devastating the result; we can see it working its way upwards, the fruit of a unanimous, all- invading, antlike society; we can witness its end in the dispersion of its individuals, each in the isolation of his own linguistic circle. We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.

The Library of Alexandria, implicit in travellers' memoirs and historians' chronicles, re-invented in works of fiction and of fable, has come to stand for the riddle of human identity, posing shelf after shelf the question "Who am I?" In Elias Canetti's 1935 novel Die Blendung (Auto da Fe), Peter Kien, the scholar who in the last pages sets fire to himself and to his books when he feels that the outside world has become too unbearably intru­sive, incarnates every inheritor of the Library, as a reader whose very self is enmeshed in the books he pos­sesses and who, like one of the ancient Alexandrian scholars, must himself become dust in the night when the library is no more. Dust indeed, the poet Francisco de Quevedo noted, early in the seventeenth century. And then added, with the same faith in the survival of the spirit that the Library of Alexandria embodied, "Dust it shall be, but dust in love."³³

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THE LIBRARY

AS ORDER

"But how do you arrange your documents?" "In pigeon-holes, partly. . . ."

"Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Sitting in my library at night, I watch in the pools of light the implacable plankton of dust shed by both the pages and my skin, hourly casting off layer after dead layer in a feeble attempt at persistence. I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

The truth is, I can't remember a time when I did not live surrounded by my library. By the age of seven or eight, I had assembled in my room a minuscule Alexandria, about one hundred volumes of different for­mats on all sorts of subjects. For the sake of variety, I kept changing their groupings. I would decide, for instance, to place them by size so that each shelf con­tained only volumes of the same height. I discovered much later that I had an illustrious predecessor, Samuel Pepys, who in the seventeenth century built little high heels for his smaller volumes, so that the tops all

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One of the bookcases that houses Pepys's collection at the Bodleian Library.

followed a neat horizontal line.³⁴1 began by placing on my lowest shelf the large volumes of picture-books: a German edition of Die Welt, in der wir leben, with detailed illustrations of the world under the sea and life in an autumn undergrowth (even today I can perfectly recall the iridescent fish and the monstrous insects), a collection of stories about cats (from which I still remember the line "Cats' names and cats' faces/ Are often seen in public places"), the several titles of Constancio C. Vigil (an Argentine chil­dren's writer who was also a secret collector of porno­graphic literature), a book of tales and poems by Margaret Wise Brown (it included a terrifying story about a boy who is successively abandoned by the ani­mal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms) and a treasured old edition of Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter in which I carefully avoided the picture of a tailor cutting off a boy's thumbs with a huge pair of scissors. Next came my books with odd shapes: single volumes of folk tales, a few pop-up books on animals, a tattered atlas which I studied carefully, trying to discover microscopic people in the tiny cities that dotted its continents. On a separate shelf I grouped what I called my "normal-size"books: May Lamberton Becker's Rainbow Classics, Emilio Salgari's pirate adventures, a two-volume Child­hood of Famous Painters, Roy Rockwood's Bomba saga, the complete fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen, the children's novels of the great Brazilian author Monteiro Lobato, Edmundo de Amicis's infamously sentimental Cuore, full of heroic and long-suffering infants. A whole shelf was given over to the many embossed red-and- blue volumes of a Spanish-language encyclopedia, El Tesoro de la juventud. My Golden Books series, slightly smaller, went on a lower shelf. Beatrix Potter and a German collection of tales from the Arabian Nights formed the last, miniature section.

But sometimes this order would not satisfy me and I'd reorganize my books by subject: fairy tales on one shelf, adventure stories on another, scientific and travel vol­umes on a third, poetry on a fourth, biographies on a fifth. And sometimes, just for the sake of change, I would group my books by language, or by colour, or according to my degree of fondness for them. In the first century a.d., Pliny the Younger described the joys of his place in the country, and among these a sunny room where "one wall is fitted with shelves like a library to hold the books I read and reread."³⁵ At times, I've thought of having a library that consisted of nothing but my most thumbed volumes.

Then there would be groupings within groupings. As I learned then, but was not able to articulate until much later, order begets order. Once a category is established, it suggests or imposes others, so that no cataloguing method, whether on shelf or on paper, is ever closed unto itself. If I decide on a number of subjects, each of these subjects will require a classifica­tion within its classification. At a certain point in the ordering, out of fatigue, boredom or frustration, I'll stop this geometrical progression. But the possibility of con­tinuing it is always there. There are no final categories in a library.

A private library, unlike a public one, presents the advan­tage of allowing a whimsical and highly personal classifi­cation. The invalid writer Valery Larbaud would have his books bound in different colours according to the language in which they were written, English novels in blue, Spanish in red, etc. "His sickroom was a rainbow," said one of his admirers, "that allowed his eye and his memory surprises and expected pleasures."³⁶ The novel­ist Georges Perec once listed a dozen ways in which to classify one's library, "none satisfactory in itself."³⁷ He halfheartedly suggested the following orders:

alphabetically by continent or country by colour

by date of purchase by date of publication by format by genre

by literary period by language

according to our reading priorities according to their binding by series

Such classifications may serve a singular, private pur­pose. A public library, on the other hand, must follow an order whose code can be understood by every user and which is decided upon before the collection is set up on the shelves. Such a code is more easily applied to an elec­tronic library, since its cataloguing system can, while serving all readers, also allow a superimposed program to classify (and therefore locate) titles entered in no pre­determined order, without having to be constantly rearranged and updated.

Sometimes the classification precedes the material ordering. In my library in the reconstructed barn, long before my books were put away in obedient rows, they clustered in my mind around specific subject-headings that probably made sense to me alone. It seemed there­fore an easy task, when in the summer of 2003 I started to arrange my library, to file into specific spaces the vol­umes already consigned to a clear set of categories. I soon discovered that I had been overly confident.

For several weeks I unpacked the hundreds of boxes that had, until then, taken up the whole of the dining- room, carried them into the empty library and then stood bewildered among teetering columns of books that seemed to combine the vertical ambition of Babel with the horizontal greed of Alexandria. For almost three months I sifted through these piles, attempting to create some kind of order, working from early in the morning to very late at night. The thick walls kept the room cool and peaceful, and the rediscovery of old and forgotten friends made me oblivious of the time. Suddenly I would look up and find that it was dark outside, and that I had spent the entire day filling only a few expectant shelves.

Sometimes I worked throughout the night, and then I would imagine all kinds of fantastical arrangements for my books that later, in the light of day, I dismissed as sadly impractical.

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. Writing in 1931, during one of his many moves, Walter Benjamin described the experience of standing among his books "not yet touched by the mild boredom of order,"³⁸ haunted by visions of the times and places he had col­lected them, of the circumstantial evidence that rendered each volume truly his. I too, during those summer months, was overwhelmed by these visions: a ticket flut­tering away from an opened book reminded me of a tram ride in Buenos Aires (trams stopped running in the late sixties) when I first read Julian Green's Moira; a name and phone number inscribed on a fly-leaf brought back the face of a friend long lost who gave me a copy of the Cantos of Ezra Pound; a paper napkin with the logo of the Cafe de Flore, folded inside Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, attested to my first trip to Paris in 1966; a let­ter from a teacher inside a collection of Spanish poetry made me think of distant classes where I first heard of Gongora and Vicente Gaos. "Habent sua fata libelli," says Benjamin, quoting the forgotten medieval essayist Maurus. "Books have their own fates." Some of mine have waited half a century to reach this tiny place in west­ern France, for which they were seemingly destined.

I had, as I have said, previously conceived of organiz­ing my library into several sections. Principal among these were the languages in which the books were writ­ten. I had formed vast mental communities of those works written in English or Spanish, German or French,

whether poetry or prose. From these linguistic pools I would exclude certain titles that belonged to subjects of interest to me, such as Greek Mythology, Monotheistic Religions, Legends of the Middle Ages, Cultures of the Renaissance, First and Second World Wars, History of the Book. . . . My choice of what to lodge under these categories might seem whimsical to many readers. Why stash the works of Saint Augustine in the Christianity section rather than under Literature in Latin or Early Medieval Civilizations? Why place Carlyle's French Revolution in Literature in English rather than in European History, and not Simon Schama's Citizens? Why keep Louis Ginzberg's seven volumes of Legends of the Jews under Judaism but Joseph Gaer's study on the Wandering Jew under Myths? Why place Anne Carson's translations of Sappho under Carson but Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses under Ovid? Why keep my two pocket volumes of Chapman's Homer under Keats?

Ultimately, every organization is arbitrary. In libraries of friends around the world, I have found many odd classifications: Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre under Sailing, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe under Travel, Mary McCarthy's Birds of America under Ornithology, Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked under Cuisine. But public lib­raries have their own odd approaches. One reader was upset because, in the London Library, Stendhal was listed under "B" for his real name, Beyle, and Gerard de Nerval under "G." Another complained that, in the same library, Women were classed "under the Miscellaneous end of Science," after Witchcraft and before Wool and Wrestling.³⁹ In the Library of Congress's catalogues, the subject-headings include such curious categories as:

banana research

bat binding

boots and shoes in art

chickens in religion and folklore

sewage: collected works

It is as if the contents of the books matter less to these organizers than the uniqueness of the subject under which they are catalogued, so that a library becomes a collection of thematic anthologies. Certainly, the sub­jects or categories into which a library is divided not only change the nature of the books it contains (read or unread) but also, in turn, are changed by them. To place Robert Musil's novels in a section on Austrian Literature circumscribes his work by nationalistic definitions of novel-writing; at the same time, it illuminates neigh­bouring sociological and historical works on the Austro- Hungarian Empire by expanding their restrictive scholarly views on the subject. Inclusion of Anton Chekhov's Strange Confession in the section of Detective Novels forces the reader to follow the story with the req­uisite attention to murder, clues and red herrings; it also opens the notion of the crime genre to authors such as Chekhov, not usually associated with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. If I place Tomas Eloy Martinez's Santa Evita in my section on Argentinian History do I diminish the book's literary value? If I place it under Fiction in Spanish am I dismiss­ing its historical accuracy?

Sir Robert Cotton, an eccentric seventeenth-century English bibliophile, ranged his books (which included many rare manuscripts, such as the only known manu­script of Beowulf, and the Lindisfarne Gospels, from about a.d. 698) in twelve bookcases, each adorned with the bust of one of the first twelve Caesars. When the British Library acquired some of his collection, it kept Cotton's strange cataloguing system, so that the Lindisfarne Gospels can today be requested as "Cotton MS. Nero D. IV" because it was once the fourth book on the fourth shelf down in the bookcase topped by the bust of Nero.⁴⁰

And yet order of almost any kind has the merit of con­taining the uncontainable. "There is probably many an old collector," G.K. Chesterton observed, "whose friends and relations say that he is mad on Elzevirs, when as a matter of fact it is the Elzevirs that keep him sane. Without them he would drift into soul-destroying idle­ness and hypochondria; but the drowsy regularity of his notes and calculations teaches something of the same les­son as the swing of the smith's hammer or the plodding of the ploughman's horses, the lesson of the ancient commonsense of things."⁴¹ The ordering of a collection of thrillers, or of books printed by Elzevir, grants the manic behaviour of the collector a certain degree of san­ity. At times I feel as if the exquisite pocket-sized leather- bound Nelsons, the flimsy Brazilian booklets known as literatura de cordel (because they were sold by hawkers who strung their wares on thin cords), the early editions of the Septimo Circulo detective series edited by Borges and Bioy Casares, the small square volumes of the New Temple Shakespeare published by Dent and illustrated with wood engravings by Eric Gill—all these books that I sporadically collect—have kept me sane.

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Several examples of literatura de cordel.

The broader the category, the less circumscribed the book. In China, at the beginning of the third century, the books in the Imperial Library were kept under four mod­est and comprehensive headings agreed upon by eminent court scholars—canonical or classical texts, works of history, philosophical works, and miscellaneous literary works—each bound in a specific and symbolic colour, respectively green, red, blue and grey (a chromatic divi­sion curiously akin to that of the early Penguins or the Spanish Coleccion Austral). Within these groupings, the titles were shelved following graphic or phonetic order- ings. In the first case, many thousands of characters were broken into a few basic elements—the ideogram for earth or water, for instance—and then placed in a conventional order that followed the hierarchies of Chinese cosmology. In the second, the order was based on the rhyme of the last syllable of the last word in a title. Equivalent to the Roman alphabetical system, which fluc­tuates between 26 (English) and 28 (Spanish) letters, the number of possible rhymes in Chinese varied between 76 and 206. The largest manuscript encyclopedia in the world, the Yongle Dadian, or Monumental Compendium from the Era of Eternal Happiness, commissioned in the fifteenth century by the Emperor Chengzu with the purpose of recording in one single publication all exist­ing Chinese literature, used the rhyming method to order its thousands of entries. Over two thousand schol­ars worked on the ambitious enterprise. Only a small portion of that monstrous catalogue survives today.⁴²

Entering a library, I am always struck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order. Some cate­gories, of course, are more evident than others, and Chinese libraries in particular have a long history of clas­sification that reflects, in its variety, the changing ways in which China has conceived the universe. The earliest catalogues follow the hierarchy imposed by a belief in the supreme rule of the gods, beneath whose primordial, all-encompassing vault—the realm of the heavenly bodies—stands the subservient earth. Then, in decreas­ing order of importance, come human beings, animals, plants and, lastly, minerals. These six categories govern the divisions under which the works of 596 authors, pre­served in 13,269 scrolls, are classified in the first-century bibliographic study known as the Hanshu Yiwen\hi, or Dynastic History of the Han, an annotated catalogue

One of the volumes of the monumental Yongle Dadian encyclopedia.

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based on the research of two imperial librarians, Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin,⁴³ who, alone, dedicated their lives to recording what others had written. Other Chinese catalogues stem from different hierarchies. The Cefu Yuangui, or Archives ofthe Divinatory Tortoise, compiled by imperial command between 1005 and 1013, follows not a cosmic order but rather a bureaucratic one, begin­ning with the emperor and descending through the vari­ous state officials and institutions down to lowly citizens.⁴⁴ (In Western terms, we could conceive of a library of English literature that began, for instance, with the Prayers and Poems of Elizabeth 1 and ended with the complete works of Charles Bukowski.) This bureau­cratic or sociological order was employed to assemble one of the first Chinese encyclopedias to call itself ex­haustive: the Taiping Yulan, or Imperial Readings from the Era ofthe Great Peace. Finished in 982, it explored all fields of knowledge; its sequel, Vast Compendium from the Era of the Great Peace, covered under fifty-five subject-headings more than five thousand biographical entries, and listed over two thousand titles. Song Taizong, the emperor who commanded its writing, is said to have read three chapters a day for one whole year. A more complex ordering system appears in what is known as the largest encyclopedia ever printed: the Qinding Gujin Tushu Jicheng, or Great Illustrated Imperial Encyclopedia of Past and Present Times, of 1726, a gigan­tic biographical library divided into more than ten thou­sand sections. The work was attributed to Jiang Tingxi, a court proofreader who used wooden blocks with cut-out pictures and movable characters specially designed for the enterprise. Each section of the encyclopedia covers one specific realm of human concern, such as Science or Travel, and is divided into subsections containing biogra­phical entries. The section on Human Relations, for instance, lists the biographies of thousands of men and women according to their occupation or position in soci­ety, among them sages, slaves, playboys, tyrants, doctors, calligraphers, supernatural beings, great drinkers, notable archers and widows who did not marry again.⁴⁵

Five centuries earlier, in Iraq, the renowned judge Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Khalikan had compiled a similar "mirror of the world." His Obituaries of Celebrities and Reports of the Sons of Their Time encompassed 826 biographies of poets, rulers, generals, philologists, histori­ans, prose writers, traditionalists, preachers, ascetics, viziers, Koranic expositors, philosophers, physicians, the­ologians, musicians and judges—providing, among other features, the subject's sexual preferences, professional merits and social standing. Because Khalikan's "biogra­phical library" was meant to "entertain as well as edify," he omitted from his great work entries on the Prophet and his companions.⁴⁶ Unlike the Chinese encyclopedias, Khalikan's opus was arranged in alphabetical order.

The alphabetical classification of books was first used over twenty-two centuries ago, by Callimachus, one of the most notable librarians of Alexandria, a poet admired by Propertius and Ovid, and the author of over eight hun­dred books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the most important Greek authors in the Library.⁴⁷ Ironically, given that he so laboriously strove to preserve the works of the past for future readers, all that remains of Callimachus's own work today is six hymns, sixty-four epigrams, a frag­ment of a little epic and, most important, the method he used to catalogue his voluminous readings. Callimachus had devised a system for his critical inventory of Greek literature that divided the material into tables or pinakes, one for each genre: epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, philoso­phy, medicine, rhetoric, law and, finally, a grab-bag of miscellany.⁴⁸ Callimachus's main contribution to the art of keeping books, inspired perhaps by methods employed in the vanished Mesopotamian libraries, was to list the chosen authors alphabetically, with biographical notes and a bibliography (also alphabetically ordered) appended to each consecrated name. I find it moving to think that, were Callimachus to wander into my library, he would be able to find the two volumes of what remains of his own works, in the Loeb series, by following the method he himself conceived to shelve the works of others.

The alphabetical system entered the libraries of Islam by way of Callimachus's catalogues. The first such work composed in the Arab world, in imitation of the pinakes, was the Book of Authors, by the Baghdad bookseller Abu Tahir Tayfur, who died in a.d. 893. Though only the title has come down to us, we know that the writers selected by Tayfur were each given a short biography and a catalogue of important works listed in alphabetical order.⁴⁹ About the same time, Arab scholars in various learning centres, concerned with lending order to Plato's dialogues so as to facilitate translation and commentaries, discovered that Callimachus's alphabetic method, which enabled readers to find a certain author in his allotted shelf, did not lend the same rigour to the placement of the texts themselves. Consulting the various bibliographies of Plato's work compiled by the long-gone librarians of Alexandria, they discovered to their astonishment that these ancient sages, in spite of following Callimachus's system, had rarely been in agreement as to what went where. All had agreed that Plato's works, for example, were to be classified under "P," but in what order or within which subgroup- ings? The scholarly Aristophanes of Byzantium, for instance, had gathered Plato's work in triads (excluding several dialogues for no clear reason), while the learned Thrasylus had divided what he assumed to be "the gen­uine dialogues" into sets of four, saying that Plato himself had always "published his dialogues in tetralogies."⁵⁰ Other librarians had listed the collected works in one sin­gle grouping but in different sequences, some beginning with the Apology, others with the Republic, others still with Phaedrus or Timaeus. My library suffers from the same confusion. Since my authors are listed in alphabeti­cal order, all of Margaret Atwood's books are to be found under the letter "A," on the third shelf down of the English language section, but I don't pay much attention to whether Life before Man precedes Cat's Eye (for the sake of respecting the chronology), or Morning in the Burned House follows Oryx and Crake (separating her poetry from her fiction).

In spite of such minor frailties, the Arab libraries that flourished in the late Middle Ages were catalogued using alphabetical order. It would otherwise have been impos­sible to consult a repertoire of books as lengthy as that of the Nizamiyya College in Damascus, where, we are told, a Christian scholar was able to peruse, in 1267, the fifty- sixth volume of a catalogue that listed nothing but works on several subjects "written during the Islamic period up to the reign of Caliph Mustansir in 1241."⁵¹

If a library is a mirror of the universe, then a catalogue is a mirror of that mirror. While in China the notion of listing all a library's books between the covers of a single book was imagined almost from the start, in the Arab world it did not become common until the fifteenth cen­tury, when catalogues and encyclopedias frequently bore the name "Library." The greatest of these annotated cat­alogues, however, was compiled at a much earlier date. In 987, Ibn al-Nadim (of whom we know little, except that he was probably a booksellerin the service of the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad) set out to assemble

the catalogue of all the books of all peoples, Arab and foreigners, existing in the Arab tongue, as well as their writings on the various sciences, together with an account of the life of those who com­posed them and the social standing of these authors with their genealogies, the date of their birth, the length of their life, the time of their death, and their cities of origin, their virtues and their faults, from the beginning of the invention of each science up to our own age, the year 377 of the Hegira.

Al-Nadim did not work only from previous bibliogra­phies; his intention, he tells us in his preface, is to "see for himself " the works in question. For this purpose he visited as many libraries as he had knowledge of, "opening vol­ume after volume and reading through scroll after scroll." This all-encompassing work, known as the Fihrist, is in fact the best compendium we have of medieval Arab knowledge; it combines in one volume "memory and inventory" and is "a library in its own right."⁵²

The Fihrist is a unique literary creation. It does not fol­low Callimachus's alphabetical order, nor is it divided according to the location of the volumes it lists. Meticu­lously chaotic and delightfully arbitrary, it is the bib­liographical record of a boundless library dispersed throughout the world and visible only in the shape al- Nadim chose to give it. In its pages, religious texts sit side by side with profane ones, scientific works grounded in arguments of authority are listed together with writings belonging to what al-Nadim called the rational sciences, while Islamic studies are paired with studies of the beliefs of foreign nations.⁵³ Both the unity and the variety of the Fihrist lie in the eye and mind of its omnivorous author.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds. A century later, the vizier Abul-Qasim al-Maghribi, dissatisfied with what he deemed to be an incomplete work, com­posed a Complement to the Catalogue of al-Nadim that extended the already inconceivable repertory to an even more astonishing length. The volumes listed in this exaggerated catalogue were likewise, of course, never collected in one place.

Looking for more practical ways to find their path through a maze of books, Arab librarians often allowed themes and disciplines to override the strictures of the alphabetical system and to impose subject divisions on the physical space itself. Such was the library visited towards 980 by a contemporary of al-Nadim, the distin­guished doctor Abou Ali El-Hossein Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Paying a visit to his patient the Sultan of Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan, Avicenna discovered a library conveniently divided into scholarly subjects of all sorts. "I entered a building of many rooms," he tells us.

In each room there were chests full of books, piled one on top of the other. In one room were poetry books in Arabic, in another books of law, and so forth; each room was given over to books of one specific science. I consulted the catalogue of Ancient Works [i.e., Greek] and asked the librarian, keeper of the live memory of the books, for what I wanted. I saw books whose very titles are for the most part unknown, books I had never seen before and which I have never seen since. I read these books and I profited from them, and I was able to recognize each one's position inside its proper scientific category.⁵⁴

These thematic divisions were commonly used together with the alphabetical system in the Islamic Middle Ages. The subjects themselves varied, as did the place in which the books were kept, whether open shelves, closed cup­boards or (as in the case of the Bukhara Library) wooden chests. Only the category of sacred books—the Koran, in a variety of copies—was always kept separate, since the word of God is not to be mixed with the word of men.

The cataloguing methods of the Library of Alexan­dria, with its space organized according to the letters of the alphabet and its books subjected to hierarchies imposed by the selected bibliographies, reached far beyond the borders of Egypt. Even the rulers of Rome created libraries in Alexandria's image. Julius Caesar, who had lived in Alexandria and had certainly frequented the Library, sought to establish in Rome "the finest pos­sible public library," and charged Marcus Terence Varro (who had written an unreliable handbook of library sci­ence, quoted approvingly by Pliny) "to collect and clas­sify all manner of Greek and Latin books."⁵⁵ The task was not carried out until after Caesar's death; in the first years of the reign of Augustus, Rome 's first public library was opened by Asinius Pollio, a friend of Catullus, Horace and Virgil. It was housed in the so- called Atrium of Freedom (its exact location has not yet been established) and decorated with portraits of famous writers.

Roman libraries like that of Asinius Pollio, specially designed to suit the learned reader in spite of names such as "Atrium of Freedom," must have felt powerfully like a place of containment and order. The earliest remains we have of such a library were unearthed on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Because Roman book collections such as Pollio's were bilingual, architects had to design in duplicate the buildings housing them. The Palatine ruins, for instance, reveal one chamber for Greek works and one for works in Latin, each with openings for statues and deep niches for wooden bookcases (armaria), while the walls appear to have been lined with shelves and protected by doors. The armaria were labelled and their codes inscribed in the cat­alogues next to the titles of the books they contained. Flights of stairs allowed readers to reach the different the­matic areas and, since some of the shelves were higher than arm's length, portable steps were available for those who required them. A reader would have picked up the desired scroll, aided perhaps by the cataloguing librarian, and unfurled it on one of the tables in the middle of the room, to examine it in the midst of a communal mum­bling, in the days before silent reading became common, or carried it out and read it under the colonnade, as was customary in the libraries of Greece.⁵⁶

But this is only guesswork. The single depiction we have of a Roman library derives from a line drawing, made in the nineteenth century, of a relief from the Augustan period found in Neumagen, Germany, and now lost.⁵⁷ It shows the scrolls lying in tiers of three on deep shelves, probably in alphabetical order within their subject section, their triangular identifying tags clearly visible to the reader, who is stretching his right arm towards them. Unfortunately, the titles on the tags can­not be read. As in any library I visit, I am curious to know what the books are, and even here, faced with the image of an image of a long-vanished collection, my eyes peer into the drawing, trying to make out the names of those ancient scrolls.

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiplies seem­ingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through associa­tion, by demanding completion of sorts. Whether in

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Engraving copied from a no longer extant Roman bas-relief, depicting the method for storing scrolls.

Alexandria, Baghdad or Rome, this expanding mass of words eventually requires systems of classification that allow it space to grow, movable fences that save it from being restricted by the limits of the alphabet or rendered useless by the sheer quantity of items it might hold under a categorical label.

Numbers seem perhaps better suited than letters or subject-headings to maintain order in this unstoppable growth. Even in the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys realized that, to allow for this surfeit, the infinite universe of numbers was more efficient than the alphabet, and he enumerated his volumes for his "easy finding them to read."⁵⁸ The numerical classification I remember from my visits to the school library (and the one most widely used throughout the world) is Dewey's, which lends the spines

Portrait of Melvil Dewey.

of books the aspect of li­cence plates on rows of parked cars.

Melvil Dewey's story is a curious combination of a generous vision and narrow views. In 1873, while still a student at Amherst College, Massa­chusetts (where he soon after became acting lib­rarian), the twenty-two- year-old Dewey realized the need for a system of classification that would com­bine both common sense and practicality. He disliked arbitrary methods, such as that of the New York State Library he had frequented, by which books were ar­ranged alphabetically but "paying no attention to sub­jects," and so he set himself the task of conceiving a better system. "For months I dreamed night and day that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution," he wrote fifty years later. "One Sunday during a long sermon . . . the solution flasht over me so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting 'Eureka!' Use decimals to num­ber a classification of all human knowledge in print."⁵⁹

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Following the subject divisions of earlier scholars, Dewey ambitiously divided the vast field of "all human knowledge in print" into ten thematic groups, and then assigned to each group one hundred numbers which in turn were broken down into a further ten, allowingfor a progression ad infinitum. Religion, for instance, received the number 200; the Christian Church, the number 260; the Christian God, the number 264.⁶⁰ The advantage of what became known as the Dewey Decimal Classification System is that, in principle, each division can be subjected to countless further divisions. God him­self can suffer being broken down into his attributes or his avatars, and each attribute and each avatar can undergo yet another fragmentation. That Sunday in church, young Dewey discovered a method of great sim­plicity and effectiveness that allowed for the huge meas­ure of its task. "My heart is open to anything that's either decimal or about libraries," he once confessed.⁶¹

Though Dewey's method could be applied to any grouping of books, his vision of the world, reflected in his thematic divisions, was surprisingly restricted. According to one of his biographers, Dewey "espoused 'Anglo-Saxonism,' an American doctrine that touted the unique virtues, mission and destiny of the Anglo-Saxon 'race. . . .' So convinced was he of the rightness of 'Anglo-Saxonism' that he based his definition of 'objec­tivity' on it."⁶² It never seems to have occurred to him that to conceive a universal system that limited the uni­verse to what appeared important to the inhabitants of a small northern island and their descendants was at best insufficient, and at worst defeated its own all-embracing purpose. Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, constructs his sense of identity by dismissing everything he doesn't understand or care for as "not English!," believing that what he puts behind him, he instantly puts out of exis­tence, with "a peculiar flourish of his right arm."⁶³ Dewey understood that he could not do this in a library, especially a limitless library, but he decided instead that everything "not Anglo-Saxon" could somehow be forced to fit into categories of Anglo-Saxon devising.

For practical reasons, however, Dewey's system, a reflection of his time and place, became hugely popular, mainly because it was easily memorized since its pattern was repeated in every subject. The system has been variously revised, simplified and adapted, but essentially Dewey's basic premise remains unchanged: everything conceivable can be attributed a number, so that the infin­ity of the universe can be contained within the infinite combination of ten digits.

Dewey continued working on his system throughout his life. He believed in adult education for those not fully schooled, in the moral superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, in simplified spelling that would not force students to memorize the irregularities of the English language (he dropped the "le" at the end of "Melville" shortly after graduating) and would "speed the assimilation of non-English-speaking immigrants into the dominant American culture." He also believed in the importance of public libraries. Libraries, he thought, had to be instru­ments of easy use "for every soul." He argued that the cornerstone of education was not just the ability to read but the knowledge of how "to get the meaning from the printed page."⁶⁴ It was in order to facilitate access to that page that he dreamt up the system for which he is remembered.

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations. Such eclectic classifications rule my own library. Ordered alphabetically, for instance, it incongruously marries humorous Bulgakov to severe Bunin (in my Russian Literature section), and makes for­mal Boileau follow informal Beauchemin (in Writing in French), properly allots Borges a place next to his friend Bioy Casares (in Writing in Spanish) but opens an ocean of letters between Goethe and his inseparable friend Schiller (in German Literature).

Not only are such methods arbitrary, they are also con­fusing. Why do I place Garda Marquez under "G" and Garda Lorca under "L"?⁶⁵ Should the pseudonymous Jane Somers be grouped with her alter ego, Doris Lessing? In the case of books written by two or more writers, should the hierarchy of ABC dictate the book's position, or (as with Nordhoff and Hall) should the fact that the authors are always mentioned in a certain order override the system? Should a Japanese author be listed according to Western or Eastern nomenclature, Kenzaburo Oe under "O" or Oe Kenzaburo under "K"? Should the once- popular historian Hendrik van Loon go under "V" or "L"? Where should I keep the delightful Logan Pearsall Smith, author of my much-loved All Trivia? Alphabetical order sparks peculiar questions for which I can offer no sensible answer. Why are there more writers whose names (in English, for instance) begin with "G" than "N" or "H"? Why are there more Gibsons than Nichols and more Grants than Hoggs? Why more Whites than Blacks, more Wrights than Wongs, more Scotts than Frenches?

The novelist Henry Green, attempting to explain his difficulty in putting names to faces in his fiction, had this to say:

Names distract, nicknames are too easy and if leaving both out as it often does makes a book look blind then that to my mind is no disadvantage. Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone, and feelings are not bounded by the associations common to place names or to persons with whom the reader is unexpectedly familiar.⁶⁶

My thematic and alphabetic library allows me that long intimacy in spite of names and in spite of appealing to what I have known, awakening feelings for which I have no words except those on the page, and experience of which I have no memory except that of the printed story. To know whether a certain book exists in my library, I have to either rely on my memory (did I once buy that book? did I lend it? was it returned?) or on a cataloguing system like Dewey's (which I am reluctant to under­take). The former forces me to exercise a daily relation­ship with my books, many unopened for long periods, unread but not forgotten, by going repeatedly through the shelves to see what is there and what is not. The latter lends certain books, which I have acquired from other libraries, mysterious notations on their spines that iden­tify them as having belonged to a nameless phantom reader from the past, cabbalistic concatenations of letters and numbers that once gave them a place and a category, far away and long ago.

Some nights I dream of an entirely anonymous library in which books have no title and boast no author, form­ing a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge, and all protagonists and all locations are unidentified, a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course. In such a library, the hero of The Castle would embark on the Pequod in search of the Holy Grail, land on a deserted island to rebuild society from fragments shored against his ruins, speak of his first centenary encounter with ice and recall, in excruciating detail, his early going to bed. In such a library there would be one single book divided into a few thousand volumes and, pace Callimachus and Dewey, no catalogue.

THE LIBRARY

AS SPACE

"No room! No room!" they cried out when they saw Alice coming. "There's plenty of room!" said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The very fact of knowing that the books in a library are set up according to a rule, whichever that may be, grants them preconceived identities, even before we open their first pages. Before my Wuthering Heights unfolds its misty story, it already proclaims itself a work of Literature in English (the section in which I've placed it), a creation of the letter B, a member of some now for­gotten community of books (I bought this copy second­hand in Vancouver, where it was allotted the mysterious number 790042B inscribed in pencil on the fly-leaf, cor­responding to a classification with which I'm not famil­iar). It also boasts a place in the aristocracy of chosen books which I take down by design and not by chance (since it sits on the highest shelf, unreachable except with a ladder). Though books are chaotic creations whose most secret meaning lies always just beyond the reader's grasp, the order in which I keep them lends them a certain definition (however trivial) and a certain sense (however arbitrary)—a humble cause for optimism.

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.

In my adolescence, I remember watching with a kind of fascinated horror, how night after night the shelves on the wall of my room would fill up, apparently on their own, until no promissory nooks were left. New books, lying flat as in the earliest codex libraries, would begin to pile up one on top of the other. Old books, occupying their measured place during the day, would double and quadruple in volume and keep any newcomers at bay. All around me—on the floor, in the corners, under the bed, on my desk—columns of books would slowly rise and transform the space into a saprophyte forest, its sprout­ing trunks threatening to crowd me out.

Later, in my home in Toronto, I put up bookshelves just about everywhere—in bedrooms and kitchen, corri­dors and bathroom. Even the covered porch had its shelves, so that my children complained that they felt they required a library card to enter their own home. But my books, in spite of any pride of place granted to them, were never satisfied. Detective Writing, housed in the basement bedroom, would suddenly outgrow the space allotted to it and would have to be moved upstairs to one of the corridor walls, displacing French Literature. French Literature would now have to be reluctantly divided into Literature of Quebec, Literature of France and Literature of Other Francophone Countries. I found it highly irritating to have Aime Cesaire, for instance, separated from his friends Eluard and Breton, and to be forced to exile Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine (Quebec's national romantic epic) into the company of books by Huysmans and Hugo, just because Hemon hap­pened to have been born in Brittany and I had no room left in the Quebecois section.

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. Families beg to be united: volume xviii of the Complete Works of Lope de Vega is announced in a cata­logue, calling to the other seventeen that sit, barely leafed through, on my shelf. How fortunate for Captain Nemo to be able to say, during his twenty-thousand- league journey under the sea, that "the world ended for me the day when my Nautilus sank underwater for the first time. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last periodicals, and since then, it is for me as if humanity no longer thought nor wrote a single

The mahogany library steps at Althorp, designed by John King. They are nine feet tall, with a seat and book-rest, and were originally backed by green silk curtains.

word."⁶⁷ But for readers like myself, there are no "last" purchases this side of the grave.

The English poet Lionel Johnson was so pressed for room that he devised shelves suspended from the ceiling, like chandeliers.⁶⁸ A friend of mine in Buenos Aires con­structed columns of four-sided shelves that spun on a cen­tral axis, quadrupling the space for his books; he called the shelves his dervish-cases. In the library of Althorp, the Northampton estate of Earl Spencer (which before its sale in 1892 comprised forty thousand volumes, including fifty-eight titles by the first English printer, William Caxton), the bookshelves rose to such dizzying heights that in order to consult the top rows a gigantic ladder was required, consisting of "a sturdy pair of steps on wheels, surmounted by a crow's nest containing a seat and small lectern, the general effect resembling a medieval siege- machine."⁶⁹ Unfortunately, the inventors of these enthu­siastic pieces of furniture, like mad geographers intent on

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extending geography to fit ever-expanding maps, are always defeated. Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

In the second chapter of Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll dreamt up the following solution: "If we could only apply that Rule to books! You know, in finding the Least Common Multiple, we strike out a quantity wher­ever it occurs, except in the term where it is raised to its highest power. So we should have to erase every recorded thought, except in the sentence where it is expressed with the greatest intensity." His companion objects: "Some books would be reduced to blank paper, I'm afraid!" "They would," the narrator admits. "Most libraries would be terribly diminished in bulk. But just think what they would gain in quality!"¹⁷' In a similar spirit, in Lyons, at the end of the first century, a strict law demanded that, after every literary competition, the los­ers be forced to erase their poetic efforts with their tongues, so that no second-rate literature would survive.¹¹

In a manuscript kept in the Vatican Library (and as yet unpublished), the Milanese humanist Angelo Decembrio describes a drastic culling system by which the young fifteenth-century prince Leonello d'Este furnished his library in Ferrara under the supervision of his teacher, Guarino da Verona.¹² Leonello's system was one of exclusion, rejecting everything except the most precious examples of the literary world. Banished from the princely shelves were monastic encyclopedic works ("oceans of story, as they are called, huge burdens for donkeys,")¹³ French and Italian translations of classic texts (but not the originals), and even Dante's Commedia, "which may be read on winter nights, by the fire, with the wife and the children, but which does not merit being placed in a scholarly library."⁷⁴ Only four classical authors were admitted: Livy, Virgil, Sallust and Cicero. All others were considered minor authors whose work could be bought from any street vendor and lent to friends without fear of losing anything of great worth.

In order to find ways to cope with volume growth (though not always concerned with gaining quality), readers have resorted to all manner of painful devices: pruning their treasures, double-shelving, divesting them­selves of certain subjects, giving away their paperbacks, even moving out and leaving the house to their books. Sometimes none of these options seems endurable. Shortly after Christmas 2003, a forty-three-year-old New York man, Patrice Moore, had to be rescued by firefighters from his apartment after spending two days trapped under an avalanche of journals, magazines and books that he had stubbornly accumulated for over a decade. Neighbours heard him moaning and mumbling through the door, which had been blocked by all the paper. Not until the lock was broken with a crowbar and rescuers began digging into the entombing piles of pub­lications was Moore found, in a tiny corner of his apart­ment, literally buried in books. It took over an hour to extricate him; fifty bags of printed material had to be hauled out before this constant reader could be reached.⁷⁵

In the 1990s, conscious that their old, stately buildings were no longer able to contain the flood of printed mat­ter, the directors of several major libraries decided to erect new premises to lodge their vast collections.

Patrice Moore's book-clogged apartment in New York City.

In Paris and London, Buenos Aires and San Francisco (among oth­ers), plans were laid out and construction began. Unfortunately, in several cases the design of the new libraries proved ill suited to house books. To compensate for the deficient planning of the new main San Francisco Public Library, in which the architect had not allowed for a suf­ficiently large amount of shelving space, the administra­tors pulled hundreds of thousands of books from the library's hold and sent them to a landfill. Since books were selected for destruction on the basis of the length of time they had sat unrequested, in order to save as many books as possible, heroic librarians crept into the stacks at night and stamped the threatened volumes with false withdrawal dates.⁷⁶

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To sacrifice the contents in order to spare the con- tainer—not only the San Francisco Public Library suf­fered from such an inane action. Even the Library of Congress in Washington, "the purported library of last resort," became the victim of equally irresponsible behaviour. In 1814, during negotiations by the American Congress to purchase the private library of former American president Thomas Jefferson—to replace the books British troops had burned earlier that year after occupying the Capitol Building in Washington—Cyril

King, the Federalist Party lawmaker, objected, "The Bill would put $23,900 into Mr Jefferson's pocket for about 6,000 books—good, bad and indifferent; old, new and worthless, in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not to." Jefferson answered, "I do not know that my library contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection: there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."⁷⁷

Over a century and a half later, Jefferson's observa­tion has been all but forgotten. In 1996, the New Yorker reporter (and best-selling novelist) Nicholson Baker heard that the Library of Congress was replacing most of its enormous collection of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century newspapers with microfilms and then destroying the originals. The justification for this official act of vandalism was based on "fraudulent" scientific studies on the acidity and embrittlement of paper, something like defending a murder by calling it a case of assisted suicide. Several years of research later, Baker reached the conclusion that the situation was even worse than he had at first feared. Nearly all major uni­versity libraries in the United States, as well as most large public libraries, had followed the Library of Congress's example, and some of the rarest periodicals no longer existed except in microfilmed versions.⁷⁸ And these versions are faulty, in many ways. Microfilms suf­fer from smudges, stains and scratches; they cut off text at the margins, and often skip entire sections.

The microfilming culprits were not all American. In 1996 the British Library, whose collection of newspa­pers had, to a large degree, escaped the bombings of the

Second World War, got rid of more than sixty thousand volumes of collected newsprint, mainly non- Commonwealth journals printed after 1850. A year la­ter, it chose to discard seventy-five runs of Western European publications; shortly afterwards, it gave away its collections of periodicals from Eastern Europe, South America and the United States. In each case, the papers had been microfilmed; in each case, the reason given for the removal of the originals was space. But as Baker argues, microfilms are difficult to read and their repro­duction qualities are poor. 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 paper, the colour of the

The Library ofCongress, Washington, D.C.

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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 estab- lished."¹⁹ There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensi­tive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading.)

But above all, the argument that calls for electronic reproduction on account of the endangered life of paper is a false one. Anybody who has used a computer knows how easy it is to lose a text on the screen, to come upon a faulty disk or CD, to have the hard drive crash beyond all appeal. The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD- ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multi­media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh- century census of England compiled by Norman monks. More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded "life in Britain" during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve- inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data,

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The Domesday Book in sections, in its present state.

but none was entirely successful. "There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem," said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. "Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost."⁸⁰ By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable.

The director for the electronic records archive pro­gram at the National Archives and Records Administra­tion of the United States confessed in November 2004 that the preservation of electronic material, even for the next decade, let alone for eternity, "is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals."⁸¹ Since no clear solution is available, electronic experts recommend that users copy their materials onto CDs, but even these are of short duration. The lifespan of data recorded on a CD with a CD burner could be as little as five years. In fact, we don't know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed on a 2004 CD. And while it is true that acidity and brittleness, fire and the legendary book­worms threaten ancient codexes and scrolls, not every­thing written or printed on parchment or paper is condemned to an early grave. A few years ago, in the Archeological Museum of Naples, I saw, held between two plates of glass, the ashes of a papyrus rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. It was two thousand years old; it had been burnt by the fires of Vesuvius, it had been buried under a flow of lava—and I could still read the letters written on it, with astonishing clarity.

And yet, both libraries—the one of paper and the electronic one—can and should coexist. Unfortunately, one is too often favoured to the detriment of the other. The new Library of Alexandria, inaugurated in October 2003, proposed, as one of its major projects, a parallel virtual library—the Alexandria Library Scholars Collective. This electronic library was set up by the American artist Rhonda Roland Shearer, and requires an annual operating budget of half a million American dol­lars, a sum likely to increase considerably in the future. These two institutions, both attempts to reincarnate the ancient library of Callimachus's time, present a paradox. While the shelves of the new stone and glass library stand almost empty for lack of financial resources, dis­playing a meagre collection of paperbacks and castoffs plus donations from international publishers, the virtual library is being filled with books from all over the world, scanned for the most part by a team of techni­cians at Carnegie-Mellon University and using software called CyberBook Plus, developed by Shearer herself and designed to allow for different formats and lan­guages "with heavy emphasis on visual rather than posted texts."⁸²

The Alexandria Library Scholars Collective is not unique in its ambition to compete with paper libraries. In 2004 the most popular of all Internet search services, Google, announced that it had concluded agreements with several of the world's leading research libraries— Harvard, the Bodleian, Stanford, the New York Public Library—to scan part of their holdings and make the books available on-line to researchers, who would no longer have to travel to the libraries themselves or dust their way through endless stacks of paper and ink.⁸³ Though, for financial and administrative reasons, Google cancelled its project in July 2005, it will doubtless be resurrected in the future, since it is so obviously suited to the capabilities of the Web. In the next few years, in all probability, millions of pages will be waiting for their on­line readers. As in the cautionary tale of Babel, "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do,"⁸⁴ and we shall soon be able to summon up the whole of the ghostly stock of all manner of Alexandrias past or future, with the mere tap of a finger.

The practical arguments for such a step are irrefu­table. Quantity, speed, precision, on-demand availabil­ity are obviously important to the researching scholar. And the birth of a new technology need not mean the death of an earlier one: the invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amica­bly on the same reader's desk. In comparing the virtual library to the traditional one of paper and ink, we need to remember several things: that reading often requires slowness, depth and context; that our electronic technol­ogy is still fragile and that, since it keeps changing, it prevents us many times from retrieving what was once stored in now superseded containers; that leafing through a book or roaming through shelves is an inti­mate part of the craft of reading and cannot be entirely replaced by scrolling down a screen, any more than real travel can be replaced by travelogues and 3-D gadgets.

Perhaps this is the crux. Reading a book is not per­fectly equivalent to reading a screen, no matter what the text. Watching a play is not equivalent to seeing a film, seeing a film is not equivalent to viewing a DVD or videotape, gazing upon a painting is not equivalent to examining a photograph. Every technology provides a medium (the dictum was pronounced in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan⁸⁵) that characterizes the work it embodies, and defines its optimum storage and access. Plays can be per­formed in circular spaces that are ill-suited for the projec­tion of films; a DVD seen in an intimate room has a different quality from the same film seen on a large screen; photos well-reproduced in a book can be fully appreciated by the viewer, while no reproduction allows the full experience of seeing an original painting.

Baker ends his book with four useful recommenda­tions: that libraries be obliged to publish the lists of the publications they intend to discard; that all publica­tions sent to and rejected by the Library of Congress

BELOW LEFT: Title page of the first edition of Naude's book. BELOW RIGHT: A stupa with its printed Buddhist text.

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be indexed and stocked in ancillary buildings provided by the state; that newspapers routinely be bound and saved; that either the program to microfilm or digitize books should be abolished, or it should become oblig­atory not to destroy the originals after they are elec­tronically processed. Together, electronic storage and the physical preservation of printed matter grant a li­brary the fulfillment of at least one of its ambitions: comprehensiveness.

Or, if nothing else, a certain measure of compre­hensiveness. The nineteenth-century American scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes admonished, "Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads,"⁸⁶ echoing the sentiments of the

French scholar Gabriel Naude, who in 1627 published a modest Advice for Setting Up a Library (revised and expanded several years later) in which he went even fur­ther in the reader's demands. "There is nothing," Naude wrote, "that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else; therefore the perfect motto is, that there exists no book, however bad or badly reviewed, that may not be sought after in some future time by a certain reader."⁸⁷ These remarks demand from us an impossibility, since every library is, by needs, an incomplete creation, a work-in-progress, and every empty shelf announces the books to come.

And yet it is for those empty spaces that we hoard knowledge. In the year 764, after the suppression of the Emi Rebellion, the Japanese Empress Shotoku, believing that the end of the world was near, decided to leave a record of her times for whatever new genera­tions might rise from the ashes. Following her orders, four dharani-sutra (essential words of wisdom transcribed into Chinese from the Sanskrit) were printed from wood­blocks on strips of paper and inserted into small wooden stupas—representations of the universe that depict the square base of the earth and the ascending circles of the heavens fixed around the staff of the Lord Buddha. These stupas were then distributed among the ten lead­ing Buddhist temples of the empire.⁸⁸

The empress imagined that she could preserve in this way a distillation of the accumulated knowledge up to her time. Ten centuries later, in 1751, her project was unknowingly restated by Denis Diderot, the co- editor (with Jean le Rond d'Alembert) of the greatest

publishing project of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers.

It is odd that the man who would later be accused of being one of the Catholic Church's fiercest enemies (the Encyclopedie was placed on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books and Diderot was threatened with excom­munication) should have begun his scholarly career as a devout Jesuit student. Diderot was born in 1713, seventy- six years before the beginning of the French Revolution. Having attended the Jesuit College at Langres as a child, in his early twenties he became an ardent and pious believer. He refused the comforts of his family home (his father was a wealthy master cutler of international fame), took to wearing a hair shirt and sleeping on straw, and eventually, urged on by his religious instructors, decided to run away and enter holy orders. Alerted to the plan, his father barred the door and demanded to know where his son was going at midnight. "To Paris, to join the Jesuits," said Diderot. "Your wishes will be granted," his father replied, "but it will not be tonight."⁸⁹

Diderot Senior kept his promise only in part. He sent his son to complete his education in Paris, where he attended not the Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand but the College d'Harcourt, founded by the Jansenists (follow­ers of an austere religious school of thought whose tenets were similar in many ways to those of Calvinism), and later the University of Paris. Diderot's intention to obtain a doctorate in theology was never fulfilled. Instead, he studied mathematics, classical literature and foreign languages without a definite goal in mind, until his father, alarmed at the prospect of having an eternal

student on his hands, cut off all financial support and ordered the young man home. Diderot disobeyed, and for the next several years earned his living in Paris as a journalist and a teacher.

Diderot and d 'Alembert met when the former had just turned thirty. D'Alembert was four years younger but had already distinguished himself in the field of mathe­matics. He possessed (according to a contemporary account) a "luminous, profound and solid mind"⁹' that much appealed to Diderot. A foundling who had been abandoned as a baby on the steps of a Paris church, d'Alembert was someone with little concern for social prestige; he maintained that the motto of every man of letters should be "Liberty, Truth and Poverty," the latter achieved, in his case, with no great effort.

Some fifteen years before their meeting, in 1728, the Scottish scholar Ephraim Chambers had published a fairly comprehensive Cyclopedia (the first in the English language, and no relation to the present-day Chambers) that inspired various other such works, among them Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. Early in 1745, the Paris bookseller Andre-Frangois Le Breton, unable to secure the trans­lation of the Cyclopedia into French, engaged the serv­ices first of d'Alembert and then of Diderot to edit a similar work but on a vaster scale. Arguing that the Cyclopedia was, to a large extent, a pilfering of a num­ber of French texts, Diderot suggested that to translate the work back into what was effectively its original tongue would be a senseless exercise; better to collect new material and offer readers a comprehensive and up-to-date panorama of what the arts and sciences had produced in recent times.

In a game of self-reflecting mirrors, Diderot defined his grand twenty-eight-volume publication (seventeen volumes of text and eleven of illustrations) in an article titled "Encyclopedie" in that same Encyclopedie: "The goal of the Encyclopedie," he wrote, "is to assemble the knowledge scattered over the surface of the globe and to expose its general system to the men who come after us, so that the labours of centuries past do not prove useless to the centuries to come. . . . May the Encyclopedie become a sanctuary in which human knowledge is pro­tected from time and from change."⁹¹ The notion of an encyclopedia as a sanctuary is appealing. In 1783, eleven years after the completion of Diderot's monumental project, the writer Guillaume Grivel imagined this sanc­tuary as the cornerstone of a future society which, like the one imagined by the Japanese empress, must rebuild itself from its ruins. In the first volume of a novel recounting the adventures of a group of new Crusoes shipwrecked on an uncharted island, Grivel describes how the new colonists rescue several volumes of Diderot's Encyclopedie from their wreck and, on the basis of its learned articles, attempt to reconstruct the society they have been forced to leave behind.⁹²

The Encyclopedie was also conceived as an archival and interactive library. In the prospectus that announced the vast project, Diderot declared that it would "serve all the purposes of a library for a professional man on any subject apart from his own." Defending his deci­sion to arrange this comprehensive "library" in alpha­betical order, Diderot explained that it would not destroy liaison between subjects nor violate "the tree of knowledge" but, on the contrary, the system would be made visible in "the disposition of the materials within each article and by the exactitude and frequency of cross-references."⁹³ What he was proposing by these cross-references was to present the diverse articles not as independent texts, each occupying the exclusive field of a given subject, but as a crossweaving of subjects that would in many cases "occupy the same shelf." Thus he imagined his "library" as a room in which different "books" were placed in a single space. A discussion of Calvinism, which, on its own, would have aroused the censorious eye of the Church, is included in an entry on geneva; a critical assessment of the Church's sacra­ments is implied in a cross-reference such as "anthro­pophagy: see eucharist, communion, altar, etc." Sometimes he quoted a foreign character (a Chinese savant, a Turk) to voice criticism of religious dogma, simultaneously including the description of other cul­tures or philosophies; sometimes he took a word in its broadest sense, so that, for example, under AdORATiON he was able to discuss both the worship of God and that of a beautiful woman, daringly associating one with the other.

The first volume of the Encyclopedic sold quickly, in spite of its high price. By the time the second volume appeared, in 1752, the Jesuits were so enraged by what was in their eyes obvious blasphemy that they urged Louis xv to issue a royal ban. Since one of Louis's daughters had fallen deathly ill, his confessor con­vinced him that "God might save her if the King, as a token of piety, would suppress the Encyclopedie."⁹⁴ Louis obeyed, but the Encyclopedie resumed publication a year later, thanks to the efforts of the Royal Director of

Publications (a sort of minister of Communications), the enlightened Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who had gone as far as suggesting to Diderot that he hide the manu­scripts of future volumes in Malesherbes's own house until the conflict blew over.

Though Diderot does not explicitly mention space in his statement of purpose, the notion of knowledge occu­pying a physical place is implicit in his words. To assem­ble scattered knowledge is, for Diderot, to ground that knowledge on a page, and the page between the covers of a book, and the book on the shelves of a library. An encyclopedia can be, among many other things, a space- saving device, since a library endlessly divided into books requires an ever-expanding home that can take on nightmare dimensions. Legend has it that Sarah Winchester, widow of the famous gun-maker whose rifle "won the West," was told by a medium that as long as construction on her California house continued, the ghosts of the Indians killed by her husband's rifle would be kept at bay. The house grew and grew, like a thing in a dream, until its hundred and sixty rooms covered six acres of ground; this monster is still visible in the heart of Silicon Valley.⁹⁵ Every library suffers from this urge to increase in order to pacify our literary ghosts, "the ancient dead who rise from books to speak to us" (as Seneca described them in the first century a.d.),⁹⁶ to branch out and bloat until, on some inconceivable last day, it will include every volume ever written on every subject imaginable.

One warm afternoon in the late nineteenth century, two middle-aged office clerks met on a bench on the

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A page from Diderot's Encyclopedie, illustrating the entry on "Writing."

Boulevard Bourdon in Paris and immediately became the best of friends. Bouvard and Pecuchet (the names Gustave Flaubert gave to his two comic heroes) discov­ered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambi­tious goal, next to which Diderot's achievement appears delightfully modest, they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavour, and cull from their readings the most outstanding facts and ideas, an enterprise that was, of course, endless. Appropriately, Bouvard and Pecuchet was published unfinished one year after Flaubert's death in 1880, but not before the two brave explorers had read their way through many learned libraries of agriculture, literature, animal husbandry, medicine, archaeology and politics, always with disappointing results. What Flaubert's two clowns discovered is what we have always known but seldom believed: that the accumulation of knowledge isn't knowledge.⁹⁷

Bouvard and Pecuchet's ambition is now almost a reality, when all the knowledge in the world seems to be there, flickering behind the siren screen. Jorge Luis Borges, who once imagined the infinite library of all possible books,⁹⁸ also invented a Bouvard-and-Pecuchet- like character who attempts to compile a universal ency­clopedia so complete that nothing in the world would be excluded from it.⁹⁹ In the end, like his French fore­runners, he fails in his attempt, but not entirely. On the evening on which he gives up his great project, he hires a horse and buggy and takes a tour of the city. He sees brick walls, ordinary people, houses, a river, a marketplace, and feels that somehow all these things are his own work. He realizes that his project was not impossible but merely redundant. The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself.

THE LIBRARY

AS POWER

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler, 23 March 1751

The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capabil­ity, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading. For the Talmudic schools, as for those of Islam, a scholar can turn religious faith into an active power through the craft of reading, since the knowledge acquired through books is a gift from God. According to an early hadith, or Islamic tradition, "one scholar is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worship­pers."¹⁰⁰ For these cultures of the Book, knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience res­cued from the page and transformed again into experi­ence, in the words reflected both in the outside world and in the reader's own being.

In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, the celebrated German mathematician, philosopher and jurist, declared that a library's value was determined only by its contents and the use readers made of that contents, not by the number of its volumes or the rarity of its treas­ures. He compared the institution of a library to a church or a school, a place of instruction and learning, and cam­paigned in favour of collecting, above all, scientific titles, while doing away with books that he considered merely decorative or entertaining, and therefore useless. "A trea­tise of architecture or a collection of periodicals," he wrote, "is worth a hundred volumes of literary clas­sics,"¹⁰¹ and he preferred small books to the larger folios because they saved space and avoided, he thought, super­fluous embellishments. He argued that the mission of libraries was to help communication between scholars, and he conceived the idea of a national bibliographical organization that would assist scientists in learning of the discoveries made by their contemporaries. In 1690 he was appointed librarian to the ducal library of Brunswick- Luneberg in Hanover, and later he became librarian at the important Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbuttel, a post he retained until his death in 1716. Leibnitz was responsible for transferring the Wolfenbuttel collection from its original site to a building he judged better suited to the housing of books, with a glass roof that let in natu­ral light, and several storeys of shelving space. The wooden structure of the building, however, did not allow for heating, and those readers who bravely sought out the books' wise words during the winter months did so with trembling hands and chattering teeth.¹⁰²

Despite Leibnitz's contention that a library should be valued strictly for its contents, books as objects have often been granted spurious authority, and the edifice

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The Her%og August Wolfenbuttel Library.

of a library has superstitiously been seen as that authority's symbolic monument. When, in Emile Zola's L'Assommoir, an enthusiast of the Emperor Napoleon iii is shown a book that portrays the monarch as a lecherous seducer, the poor man is incapable of finding words to defend his king because "it was all in a book; he could not deny it!"¹⁰³ Even today, when little or no importance is accorded to the intellectual act, books, read or unread, whatever their allotted use or value, are often lent such awe-inspiring prestige. Fat volumes of memoirs are still authored by those who wish to be seen as powerful, and libraries are still founded by (and named after) politi­cians who, like the ancient kings of Mesopotamia, wish to be remembered as purveyors of that power. In the United States, a string of presidential libraries testifies to this desire for intellectual immortality (as well as tax relief). In France, every year offers a crop of confes­sional writings, candid recollections and even fiction by leading politicians; in 1994 ex-president Valery Giscard d'Estaing went as far as demanding membership in the exclusive Academie Frangaise, reserved for the elite of French intellectuals, on the strength of a slim romantic novel, Le Passage.¹⁰⁴ He succeeded. In Argentina, both Evita and Juan Peron prided themselves on their auto­biographies—cum—political testaments, which every­one knew had been ghost-written. Wishing to dispel the image of an illiterate ruler, early on in his career Peron had himself invited by the Argentinian Academy of Letters to pronounce a speech on the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Cervantes—an author whose work, he laughingly confessed later in life, he hadn't ever bothered to read,¹⁰⁵ but whose large leather-bound,

The last great king ofAssyria, Ashurbanipal.

gold-lettered tomes could be seen behind him in sev­eral official photographs.

King Ashurbanipal, Assyr­ia's last important monarch, who ruled from 668 to 633 B.C., was fully aware of the association between rulers and the written word. He boasted that he himself was a scribe, though "among the kings, my forerunners, none had learned such an art." His collection of tablets assembled in his palace in Nin­eveh, while meant for private use, nevertheless stated in the colophon of tablet after tablet, for all to read, that the power granted by the art of letters had been bestowed into his hands:

Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria, who trusts in Ashur and Ninlil, whom Nabu and Tashmetu gave wide- open ears and who was given profound insight. . . . The wisdom of Nabu, the signs of writing, as many as have been devised, I wrote on tablets, I arranged the tablets in series, I collated [them], and for my royal contemplation and recital I placed them in my palace.¹⁰⁶

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Though Ashurbanipal, like hosts of rulers after him, claimed to be proud of his talents as a scribe and reader, what clearly mattered most to him was not the transfor­mation of experience into learning but the emblematicrepresentation of the powerful qualities associated with books. Under such rulers, libraries become not "temples of learning" (as the commonplace has it) but temples to a benefactor, founder or provider.

Centuries after Ashurbanipal, the symbolic value of funding a library has not much changed. Even during the Renaissance, when libraries in Europe became officially public (beginning with the Ambrosiana in Milan, in 1609), the prestige of funding, endowing or building such an institution remained the privilege of a benefac­tor, not a community. The notorious millionaires who, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made their for­tunes in the factories, mills and banks of the United States assiduously used their money to establish schools, museums and, above all, libraries which, beyond their importance as cultural centres, became monuments to their founders.

"What is the best gift which can be given to a com­munity?" asked the most famous of these benefactors, Andrew Carnegie, in 1890. "A free library occupies the first place," he declared in answer to his own ques- tion.¹⁰⁷ Not everyone was of his opinion. In Britain, for instance, the truism that "a public library is essential for the welfare of a community" was not officially pro­claimed until 1850, when the MP for Dumfries, William Ewart, forced a bill through Parliament estab­lishing the right of every town to have a free public library.¹⁰⁸ As late as 1832, Thomas Carlyle was angrily asking, "Why is there not a Majesty's library in every county town? There is a Majesty's jail and gallows in

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every one! ¹⁰⁹

Andrew Carnegie's story does not allow for simple conclusions. His relationship to wealth and the culture of books was complex and contradictory. Implacable in his pursuit of financial gain, he donated almost 90 percent of his enormous fortune to fund all manner of public insti­tutions, including over 2,500 libraries in a dozen English- speaking countries, from his native Scotland to Fiji and the Seychelles. He worshipped but did not love intellec­tual pursuits. "The public library was his temple," wrote one of his biographers, "and the 'Letters to the Editor' column his confessional."¹¹⁰ Brutal in the treatment of his workers, he established a private pension list to assist financially over four hundred artists, scientists and poets, among them Walt Whitman, who described his benefac­tor as a source "of kindest good will." Though he believed in the sanctity of capitalism (what he called "the Gospel of Wealth"), he insisted that "a working man is a more useful citizen and ought to be more respected than

an idle prince."¹¹¹

Carnegie's beginnings, as he himself was quick to remind his listeners, were desperately poor. Two men exerted the greatest influence over his childhood in Scotland. One was his father, an able weaver of damask cloth, whose skills were soon made redundant by the new manufacturing technology of the Industrial Revolution. Will Carnegie was by all accounts a man of spirit who, in spite of being forced to work ten to twelve hours a day, found time to create with his fellow-weavers a small communal library in Dunfermline, a courageous act that must have strongly impressed his young son. The other was Carnegie's uncle Thomas Morrison, a land-reform evangelist who preached non-violent opposition to the abusive industrialists and the end of what he saw as the enduring feudal system in Scotland. "Our rule," he taught, "is Each shall possess; all shall enjoy; Our principle, universal and equal right; and our 'law of the land' shall be Every man a lord; every woman a lady; and every child an heir."^m During one of the riots against the large linen manufacturers who were threaten­ing, once again, to cut the wages of the weavers, Uncle Thomas was arrested. Though he was never formally charged, the incident marked the young Carnegie power­fully, though not enough to colour his business ethics. Years later, he displayed in his study the framed handbill with the charges, calling it his "title to nobility." From such experiences, he said, he developed "into a violent young Republican whose motto was 'death to privi­lege.'"¹¹³ And yet, when Carnegie ruled over his own fac­tories and mills in Pittsburgh, his employees were forced to work seven days a week, were denied all holidays except Christmas and the Fourth of July, were paid miserly wages and were forced to live in insalubrious housing estates where the sewers ran alongside the water pipes. One-fifth of Carnegie's men died due to accidents.¹¹⁴ In 1848, when Carnegie was barely thirteen, his parents became destitute. To escape famine, the family emigrated to the United States and, after a difficult crossing, settled in Pittsburgh, where they discovered that the situation of the weavers was scarcely better than back home. At length the young Carnegie found work, first at the Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company and later with the Pennsylvania Railroad. In the railroad offices, work ended early in the evening, leaving the boy time "for self-improvement."

In downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie discovered a free public library founded by a certain Colonel Anderson "for apprentices for whom school was not an option." "Colonel Anderson opened to me the intellectual wealth of the world," he recalled in 1887. "I became fond of reading. I reveled week after week in the books. My toil was light, for I got up at six o'clock in the morning, con­tented to work until six in the evening if there was then a book for me to read."¹¹⁵

But in 1853 Anderson's library changed locale and the new administration decided to charge all customers, except "true apprentices" (that is to say, those bound to an employer), a fee of two dollars. The sixteen-year-old Carnegie, an apprentice not officially "bound," felt that the measure was unjust and, after uselessly arguing with the librarian, wrote an open letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. It appeared on 13 May 1853.

Mr Editor:

Believing that you take a deep interest in whatever tends to elevate, instruct and improve the youth of this country, I am induced to call your attention to the following. You will remember that some time ago Mr. Anderson (a gentleman of this city) bequested a large sum of money to establish and support a Library for working boys and apprentices residing here. It has been in successful operation for over a year, scattering precious seeds among us, and although fallen [sic] "by the wayside and in stony places," not a few have found good ground. Every working boy has been freely admitted only requiring his parents or guardian to become surety. But its means of doing good have recently been greatly circumscribed by new directors who refuse to allow any boy who is not learning a trade and bound for a stated time to become a member. I rather think that the new directors have misunderstood the generous donor's intentions. It can hardly be thought that he meant to exclude boys employed in stores merely because they are not bound.

A Working Boy though not bound.¹¹⁶

After a brisk exchange of letters, the harried librarian was forced to call a meeting of trustees, in which the question was settled in the boy's favour. For Carnegie, it was a question of what he himself considered "fair usage." As he was later repeatedly to prove, any argu­ment of justice, any question of rights, any effort of self- improvement only carried weight if it ultimately succeeded in procuring Carnegie himself greater savings or greater power. "Money no object compared to power," he said to one of his business partners some twenty-five years later.¹¹⁷

The United States of the late nineteenth century pro­vided Carnegie with an ideal setting for his convictions. Called upon on one occasion to exalt the merits of American institutions in comparison to those of his native Scotland, he described his adopted country as "the perfect place to pursue one's business." In the United States, he argued, "the mind is freed from superstitious reverence to old customs, unawed by gor­geous and unmeaning show and form." As his biogra­pher Peter Krass points out, in Carnegie's description of the American utopia "there was no mention of the cotton and iron riots in which the police forces were routed, no word of slavery, Indian relocation, or women's suffrage in discussing equality of voice.

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Carnegie presenting his trust as "a Trustworthy Beast" to Uncle Sam, a cartoon from Harper's Weekly.

[Carnegie] had a selective memory; he preferred to ignore America's underside, as he would when making his millions in steel while his exploited workers died by the dozens."¹¹⁸

Carnegie believed that a man must be ruthless if he was to become wealthy, but he also believed that such wealth should be employed in "illuminating the spirit" of the community he exploited. To his detractors, the libraries he funded were merely stepping-stones to per­sonal glorification. He very rarely gave money for books, only for the building in which they were to be lodged, and even then he stipulated that the town provide the site and the cash to maintain the library. He insisted that his libraries run as efficiently as his mills, and that no extrav­agance be indulged in. Nor did he give to state libraries or subscription libraries, because these institutions had access to alternative funding. "He has bought fame and paid cash for it," Mark Twain once quipped.¹¹⁹

Many criticized the Carnegie libraries as anti­democratic, judging them "centres for exerting social control on the working-classes," "forcing upon the read­ers capitalistic ideas and values in an attempt to control their thoughts and actions."¹²⁰ Whatever the case, these libraries served a purpose well beyond Carnegie's self- aggrandizement. When the architect who designed Carnegie's first library asked for the millionaire's coat of arms to be carved over the entrance, Carnegie, who had no such distinction, suggested instead an allegorical rising sun surrounded by the words "Let There Be Light."¹²¹ For decades the Carnegie libraries remained a paradox: a monument to their founder, and a fruitful cultural instrument that helped awaken thousands of intellectual lives.

Dozens of writers have acknowledged their debt to the Carnegie libraries. John Updike, describing his own experiences as a teenager at the Carnegie Library of Reading, Pennsylvania, spoke of his gratitude "for the freedom given me in those formative years when we, generally speaking, become lifelong readers or not." He concluded, "A kind of heaven opened up for me there."¹²² Eudora Welty traced back to the Carnegie Library of Jackson, Mississippi, the beginnings of her literary life. As Carnegie had stipulated, his donation was conditional

Andrew Carnegie's bookplate.

on the community's under­taking to guarantee the upkeep and smooth ad­ministration of the library; in Jackson, in 1918, the librarian in charge of these tasks was a certain Mrs. Calloway. Mrs. Calloway, Welty recalled, "ran the Library absolutely by her­self, from the desk where she sat with her back to the books and facing the stairs, her dragon eye on the front door, where who knew what kind of person might come in from the public? silence in big black letters was on signs tacked up everywhere." Mrs. Calloway made her own rules about books. "You could not take back a book to the Library on the same day you'd taken it out; it made no difference to her that you'd read every word in it and needed another to start. You could take out two books at a time and two books only; this applied as long as you were a child and also for the rest of your life." But such arbitrary rules made no difference to Welty's reading passion; what counted was that someone (she did not then know who this distant benefactor was) had set up a treasure trove for her personally (she believed), through which her "devouring wish to read" was in­stantly granted.¹²³

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The sarcastic critic H.L. Mencken objected. "Go to the nearest Carnegie Library," he instructed, "and exam­ine its catalog of books. The chances are five to one thatyou will find the place full of literary bilge and as bare of good books as a Boston bookshop."¹²⁴ But for most writ­ers, even if the stock of books is not formidable, to be able to enter a place where books are seemingly number­less and available for the asking is a joy in itself. "I knew this was bliss," Welty wrote late in life, "knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end."

Carnegie himself may have believed that the buildings he paid for would serve as proof of "my efforts to make the earth a little better than I found it."¹²⁵ Whatever his desire may have been, for hundreds of thousands of readers the Carnegie libraries became not the proof of any selfless or egotistical concern, or of a millionaire 's magnanimity, but the necessary intellectual stronghold at the heart of any literate society, a place where all citi­zens, provided they can read, are granted the basic right to make themselves "powerful against the Devil."

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THE LIBRARY

AS SHADOW

But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical hierarchy of exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selec­tion, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences. Of Aeschylus's 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides, only 18 (if we include the Rhesus, of doubtful authentic­ity); of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be. Even within the strictest circumscriptions, any choice of books will be greater than its label, and

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A book-burning in Warsaw, Indiana.

an inquiring reader will find danger (salutary or repre­hensible) in the safest, most invigilated places. Our mis­take, perhaps, has been to look upon a library as an all-encompassing but neutral space. "The keepers," wrote the American poet Archibald MacLeish during his posting as librarian of Congress, "whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral."¹²⁶ Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

This implicit censorship starts with the earliest Mesopotamian libraries we know of, from the beginning of the third millennium B.C.¹²⁷ Unlike official archives, set up to preserve the daily transactions and ephemeral dealings of a particular group, these libraries collected works of a more general nature, such as the so-called royal inscriptions (commemorative tablets of stone or metal that retold important political events, akin to the broadsheets of seventeenth-century Europe or today's current events best-sellers). In all probability these libraries were privately owned—personal spaces set up by lovers of the written word, who would often instruct the scribes to copy the owner's name on the tablets as a mark of possession. Even libraries attached to a temple usually carried the name of a high priest or some other important personage responsible for the collection. So as to preserve the order established by a particular shelving or cataloguing method, certain library books carried a warning colophon intended to dissuade anyone wishing to tamper with the assigned category. A dictionary from the seventh century b.c. carries this prayer: "May Ishtar bless the reader who will not alter this tablet nor place it elsewhere in the library, and may She denounce in anger he who dares withdraw it from this building."¹²⁸ I have placed this warning on the wall of my own library to ward off borrowers in the night.

Most of the owners of these collections were of royal blood, and they kept their libraries stocked through the agency of buyers and looters. King Ashurbanipal, in order to supplement his already considerable library, was known to dispatch representatives throughout his vast kingdom to search for whatever volumes might be missing. He had no guiding principle defined by cate­gories (later imposed on the collection); his was a hap­hazard hoarding of anything at hand.¹²⁹ We have a letter in which Ashurbanipal, after listing the books he is seek­ing, insists that the task should be carried out without delay. "Find them and dispatch them to me. Nothing should detain them. And in the future, if you discover other tablets not herewith mentioned, inspect them and, if you consider them of interest for the library, collect them and send them on to me."¹³⁰ A similar all-inclusive impulse governed the composition of other Mesopota- mian lists and catalogues. Commenting on the cele­brated Code of Hammurabi, that compendium of laws from the eighteenth century B.C., the historian Jean Bottero stressed the fact that it included in its enumera­tions "not only the common and commonly observable reality, but also the exceptional, the aberrant: in the end, everything possible."¹³¹

Though a library such as that of Ashurbanipal was the visible expression of earthly power, no single person, however royal, could hope to read through it all. To read every book and to digest all the information, the king recruited other eyes and other hands to scan the tablets and summarize their findings, so that in reading these digests he might be able to boast that he was familiar with the library's entire contents. Scholars extracted the meat from the texts and then, "like pelicans," regurgi­tated it for the benefit of others.

Four centuries after Ashurbanipal, in the first half of the second century B.C., a couple of the principal librarians of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium and his disciple

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A contemporary cartoon depicting a book-burning in Nazi Germany.

Aristarchus of Samothrace, decided to assist their read­ers in a similar fashion. Not only did they select and gloss all manner of important works, but they also set out to compile a catalogue of authors who, in their opinion, surpassed all others in literary excellence.¹³² The qualifi­cations of the two scholars were impeccable. Aristophanes had edited the works of Homer and Hesiod,¹³³ and to his edition of the latter he had added brief critical notes in which he listed other writers who had dealt with the same material; these notes, known as hypotheseis, were essentially annotated bibliographies that allowed readers a quick and exact overview of a certain subject. Aristarchus had also edited the works of Homer, with a rigour that was legendary, so that any exacting critic who followed him became known as an aristarchus. These lists of "best authors" (lists which, almost two thousand years later, the scholar David Ruhnken would call "canons"¹³⁴) were copied out well into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and granted the included authors literary immortality, since their works were sought after and assiduously studied. On the other hand, authors not present in these lists were considered unworthy of attention and were allowed to fade into ashes and oblivion. This lengthy, never- compiled catalogue of neglected authors haunts us by its absence.

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order or space. In the library of my Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, we felt it behind the imposing wooden doors, in the wel­coming gloom, and under the green-shaded lamps that reminded me vaguely of the lamps in sleeping-car com­partments. Up the marble staircase, down the tiled floor, between the grey columns, the library seemed a parallel universe, both fearful and comforting, in which my own story had other adventures and other endings. Above all, absence (of the books deemed improper, dangerous, provocative) gaped in the dark holes that pierced the countless shelves of books towering up to the ceiling.

And yet, many seemingly innocent titles deceived the librarian's censorious eye. I remember, in the silence

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Warning sign in the library at Le Presbytere.

broken by whispered snatches of conversation, the pages at which certain books would spontaneously fall open: Lorca's Romancero gitano at "The Unfaithful Bride," La Celestina at the brothel scene, Cortazar's Los Premios at the chapter in which a young boy is seduced by a wicked sailor. How these forbidden texts had found their way into our scrupulous library we never knew, and we wondered how long it would be before the librarian discovered that, under his very nose, genera­tion after generation of corruptible students filled the absence on the shelves by selectively reading these scan­dalous books.

It may be, as Primo Levi suggests in his memoirs, that the unspoken purpose of librarians is to make sure that only those truly wishing access to books be allowed into the sanctum. For Levi, the library of Turin's Chemical Institute in the 1930s was

at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administra­tion followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library's schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the win­ter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness, stationed at the threshold to terrify with his appearance and his howl those aspiring to enter.¹³⁵

Like Levi's unwelcoming library, and like the far less for­bidding one of my school, every library, including those under strictest surveillance, contains secretly rebellious texts that escape the librarian's eye. As a prisoner in a Russian camp near the polar circle doing what he called "my own time in the North,"¹³⁶ Joseph Brodsky read W.H. Auden's poems, and they strengthened his resolve to defy his jailers and survive for the sake of a glimpsed-at freedom. Haroldo Conti, tortured in the cells of the Argentinian military of the 1970s, found solace in the novels of Dickens, which his jailer had allowed him to keep.¹³⁷ For the writer Varlam Chalamov, sent by Stalin to work in the gold mines of Kolyma because of his "counter-revolutionary activities," the prison library was itself a gold mine that "for incomprehensible reasons, had escaped the innumerable inspections and 'purges' systematically inflicted upon all of Russia's libraries." On its miserable shelves Chalamov found unexpected treasures such as Bulgakov's writings and the poems of Mayakovski. "It was," he said, "as if the authorities had wished to offer the prisoners a consolation for the long road ahead, for the Calvary awaiting them. As if they thought: 'Why censor the reading of those con­demned?'"¹³⁸

Sometimes, those who take upon themselves the task of guarding the entrance to the library's stacks find danger where others see none. During the hunt for "subversive elements" under the military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s, anyone in possession of a "suspicious" book could be arrested and detained without charge. "Suspicious" were the poems of Neruda and Nazim Hikmet (they were communists), the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (they were Russian) and any book with a dangerous word in its title, such as Stendhal's The Red and the Black or the sixteenth- century Japanese classic Comrade Loves of the Samurai. In fear of sudden police raids, many people burnt their libraries by lighting bonfires in their toilets, and plumbers became suddenly perplexed by an epidemic of broken toilet bowls (the heat of burning paper causes the porcelain to crack). "He has children who saw him burn his books" is how the novelist German Garcia defines the generation that was killed, tortured or forced into exile.¹³⁹

Those in power can ban books for peculiar motives. General Pinochet famously excluded Don Quixote from the libraries of Chile because he read in that novel an argument for civil disobedience, and the Japanese minis­ter of Culture, several years ago, objected to Pinocchio because it showed unflattering pictures of handicapped people in the figures of the cat who pretends to be blind and the fox who pretends to be lame. In March 2003 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who was to become Pope Benedict xvi) argued that the Harry Potter books "deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly."¹⁴⁰ Other idiosyncratic reasons have been given for banning all manner of books, from The Wizard of O{ (a hotbed of pagan beliefs) to The Catcher in the Rye (a dangerous adolescent role model). In the words of William Blake,

Both read the Bible day and night,

But thou read'st black where I read white.¹⁴¹

As I've said, any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but for­midable library of the books that, for conventional rea­sons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the stern Jesuit Jacob Gretser published a defence of censorship under the explicit title Of the Laws and Customs Concerning the Banning, Expurgation and Destruction of Heretical and Noxious Books. Gretser's erudition led him to be appointed advisor to the Catholic Church when the Index of Forbidden Books was being compiled in Madrid in 1612; he employed that same erudition to support the argument (evident to many) that censorship of books is common to all peoples in all times. Gretser's infamous genealogy begins with the pagans who burned Cicero's treatise On the Nature of the Gods (for being too inclined to monotheism, according to an old, unproven story), and leads up to the book-burnings of the followers of Luther and Calvin.¹⁴² Had Gretser been able to look into the future, he could have added to his list the "degenerate" books condemned to the pyre by the Nazis, the works of the "bourgeois" writers proscribed by Stalin, the publications of the "Communist scrib­blers" exiled by Senator McCarthy, the books destroyed by the Taliban, by Fidel Castro, by the government of North Korea, by the officials of Canada Customs. Gretser's book is in fact the unacknowledged history of those colossal libraries that whisper from the gaps on

the bookshelves.¹⁴³

Earlier, I mentioned the legend that accused Amr ibn al­As of ordering Caliph Omar I to set fire to the books in Alexandria. Omar's apocryphal response deserves to be quoted here because it echoes the curious logic of every book-burner then and now. He is said to have acquiesced by saying, "If the contents 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."¹⁴⁴ Omar was addressing— somewhat stridently, it is true—the essential fluidity of literature. Because of it, no library is what it is set up to be, and a library's fate is often decided not by those who created it for its merits but by those who wish to destroy it for its supposed faults.

This is true of the native literature of the Americas, of which hardly anything has reached us. In Mexico and

Central America, particularly, the great libraries and archives of the pre-Columbian peoples were systemati­cally destroyed by the Europeans, both to deprive them of an identity and to convert them to the religion of Christ. The Australian poet A.D. Hope tells the story of how the Spanish conquistadores set fire to the books of the Maya:

Diego de Landa, archbishop of Yucatan —The curse of God upon his pious soul— Placed all their Devil's picture books under ban And, piling them in one sin-heap, burned the whole;

But he took the trouble to keep the calendar By which the Devil had taught them to count time. The impious creatures tallied back as far As ninety million years before Eve's crime.

That was enough: they burned the Mayan books, Saved souls and kept their own in proper trim. Diego de Landa in heaven always looks Towards God: God never looks at him.¹⁴⁵

Diego de Landa's contemporary Friar Juan de Zumarraga, "a name that should be as immortal as that of Omar," says William Prescott in his classic Conquest of Mexico,¹⁶ did likewise with the books of the Aztecs. Zumarraga was born in Durango, Spain, in 1468 and studied in the Franciscan monastery of Aranzazu, in the Basque Country. Appointed to the Most Holy Office of the Inquisition, he received his first inquisitorial commission from the Emperor Charles v "to hunt the witches of Biscay" in northern Spain. Zumarraga proved himself so

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A nineteenth-century engraving based on a sixteenth-century portrait of Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga.

successful that shortly afterwards he was posted to the Viceroyalty of Mexico as bishop-elect. In 1547, Pope Paul 11 crowned him first archbishop of Mexico.

Zumarraga spent seven years as head of the Mexican Inquisition, from 1536 to 1543, during which time he wrote a catechism for native neophytes and a brief man­ual of Christian doctrine for use in the missions, super­vised the translation of the Bible into a number of native languages and founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco, where the sons of the native nobility were taught Latin, philosophy, rhetoric and logic so that they could become "good Christians." Zumarraga's name, however, is mainly associated with two events that pro­foundly affected the history of Mexico: he was responsi­ble for creating the first printing press in the New World, and for destroying most of the vast literature of the Aztec Empire.

Zumarraga had long been convinced of the need to print locally the books required for the conversion of the natives, since he felt that it was difficult to control, across the ocean, the accuracy of translations into native lan­guages, and the contents of doctrinal books for a native audience. In 1533, on a return voyage to Spain, he visited several printers in Seville in order to find one willing to assist him in establishing a printing press in Mexico. He found his partner in the person of Jacobo Cromberger, a converted Jew with long experience in the making of books, who was willing to invest in the overseas enterprise "a press, ink, type and paper, as well as other implements of the trade, the whole estimated at 100,000 maravedis, "¹⁴⁷ and to send as his representative one of his assistants, an Italian known as Juan Pablos or Giovanni Paoli.

The ways of censors are mysterious. Zumarraga's obligation as Inquisitor was to seek out and punish all those perceived to be enemies of the Catholic Church— idolaters, adulterers, blasphemers, witches, Lutherans, Moors and Jews—and he did so with extraordinary feroc­ity. Converted Jews had, since the days of Columbus, been denied permission to establish themselves in the colonies. But since the financial capital required to set up business in the New World was often in the hands of Jewish and Moorish converts, illegal immigration became common in the early years of the sixteenth century, and by 1536 there was a sizable Jewish community in Mexico. The first Mexican ordinance against heretics and Jews dates from 1523, decreeing that those who denounced a converted Jew who practised his religion secretly would benefit from a third of the Jew's confiscated property (the other two-thirds going to the royal treasurer and to the judge). Accordingly, accusations flourished, and Zumarraga in particular persecuted the Jews with relent­less determination, often condemning them to be burnt at the stake on the flimsiest of evidence.¹⁴⁸ It is therefore puz­zling to learn that Zumarraga chose the services of a con­verted Jew to establish his Mexican press. Though he must have been aware of his partner's bloodline, Zumarraga left no comment on his choice, and we can wonder, at a dis­tance of almost five centuries, how the Inquisitor justified his relationship with the "impure" Cromberger.

Nor do we know whether Zumarraga understood the paradox of on the one hand creating books, and on the other hand destroying them. Shortly after his appoint­ment as head of the Inquisition, he sent troops to the farthest corners of the colony to ferret out anyone sus­pected of possessing Aztec religious objects or illumi­nated books. Through bribes and torture he discovered the location of important collections of art and entire native libraries the Aztec notables had hidden away, "especially from Tezcuco," Prescott writes, "the most cultivated capital in Anahuac, and the great depository of the national archives." Finally, after an astonishing number of paintings and books had been collected by his emissaries, Zumarraga had them piled in a tall heap in the marketplace of Tlaltelolco, and burnt. The fire, wit­nesses say, lasted several days and nights.

Thanks to the efforts of other, more enlightened Spaniards (of Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, for example, who preserved and translated a number of Aztec texts), we have an approximate idea of what was lost: a complex vision of the universe, with its theology, its songs, its sto­ries, its historical chronicles, its works of philosophy and divination, its scientific treatises and astronomical charts.¹⁴⁹ Among the treasures that miraculously sur­vived, in 1924 scholars discovered, in the so-called Secret Archives of the Vatican, fourteen of the thirty chapters of the Book of Dialogues, the last major work in Nahuatl (one of the many languages spoken in the Aztec Empire), written in the mid-sixteenth century. In this book, a group of native priests and scholars defend the Aztec view of the world against Catholic dogma, in a dramatic series of dialogues reminiscent of those of Plato. Works like the Book of Dialogues (and there were no doubt many) would have helped Europeans under­stand the people they were encountering, and allowed for an exchange of wisdom and experience.

Even from a political and religious point of view, the destruction of an opposing culture is always an act of stupidity, since it denies the possibility of allegiance, conversion or assimilation. The Spanish Dominican Diego Duran, writing shortly before his death in 1588, argued that in order to attempt to convert the natives of the New World it was necessary to know their customs and religion, and he blamed those who, like Diego de Landa and Zumarraga, burnt the ancient books:

Those who with fervent zeal (though with little prudence) in the beginning burned and destroyed all the ancient Indian pictographic documents were mistaken. They left us without a light to guide us— to the point that the Indians worship idols in our presence, and we understand nothing of what goes on in their dances, in their market­places, in their bathhouses, in the songs they chant (when they lament their ancient gods and lords), in their repasts and banquets; these things mean nothing to us.¹⁵⁰

Few of those in power paid attention to Duran's warnings. The destruction of the books of pre-Columbian America exemplify the fear that those in power have of the sub­versive capabilities of the written word. Sometimes they believe that even committing books to the flames is not enough. Libraries, in their very being, not only assert but also question the authority of power. 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, they 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. "We scorn," wrote Tacitus in the first century, "the blindness of those who believe that with an arrogant act even the memory of posterity can be extinguished.

In fact, the sentence increases the prestige of the noble spirits they wish to silence, and foreign potentates, or those others who have used similar violence, have obtained nothing other than shame for themselves and lasting fame for their enemies."¹⁵¹

The libraries that have vanished or have never been allowed to exist greatly surpass in number those we can visit, and form the links of a circular chain that accuses and condemns us all. Three and a half centuries after Omar's riposte, the notorious Abi-Amir al-Mansur, Moorish regent of Cordoba, condemned to the flames a rare collection of scientific and philosophical works collected in the Andalusian libraries by his predecessors. As if answering across the ages Omar's pitiless judg­ment, the historian Sa'id the Spaniard was moved to observe, "These sciences were despised by the old and criticized by the mighty, and those who studied them were accused of heresy and heterodoxy. Thereafter, those who had the knowledge held their tongue, went into hiding and kept secret what they knew for a more enlightened age."¹⁵² We are still waiting. Five centuries later, in 1526, Ottoman soldiers led by Sultan Suleiman 11 rode into Buda and set fire to the Great Corvina Library, founded by King Matthias Corvinus in 1471 and said to have been one of the jewels of the Hungarian crown, in an attempt to annihilate the culture of the peo­ple they had conquered.¹⁵³ A further three centuries after that destruction, in 1806, Suleiman's descendants emu­lated them by burning the extraordinary Fatimid Library in Cairo, containing over a hundred thousand precious volumes.¹⁵⁴

In our time, a government's methods of censorship are less drastic but still effective. In March 1996 the French minister of Culture, Philippe Douste-Blazy, object­ing to the cultural policies of the Mayor of Orange, a member of Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right-wing party, ordered the inspection of the municipal library of that city. The report, published three months later, concluded that the Orange librarians were under orders from the mayor to withdraw certain books and magazines from the library shelves: any publications of which Le Pen's followers might disapprove, any books by authors criti­cal of the party, and certain foreign literature (North African folk tales, for example) that was considered not part of true French cultural heritage.¹⁵⁵

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Congress of the United States passed a law, Section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, allowing federal agents to obtain records of books borrowed at any public library or bought at any private bookstore. "Unlike traditional search warrants, this new power does not require officers to have evidence of any crime, nor provide evidence to a court that their target is suspected of one. Nor are library staff allowed to tell targeted individuals that they are being investigated."¹⁵⁶ Under such requirements, a num­ber of libraries in the United States, kowtowing to the authorities, reconsidered the purchase of various titles.

Sometimes, it is nothing but a random act that deter­mines the fate of a library. In 1702, the scholar Arni Magnusson learned that the impoverished inhabitants of Iceland, starving and naked under Danish rule, had raided the ancient libraries of their country—in which unique copies of the Eddas had been kept for over six hundred years—in order to turn the poetic parchment into winter clothes. Alerted to this vandalism, King Frederick iv of Denmark ordered Magnusson to sail to Iceland and rescue the precious manuscripts. It took Magnusson ten years to strip the thieves and reassemble the collection, which, though soiled and tailored, was shipped back to Copenhagen, where it was carefully guarded for another fourteen-odd years—until a fire reduced it to illiterate ashes.¹⁵⁷

Will libraries always exist under such uncertainties? Perhaps not. Virtual libraries, if they become technolog­ically resilient, can circumvent some of these threats; there would no longer be any justification for culling, since cyberspace is practically infinite, and censorship would no longer affect the majority of readers, since a censor, confined to one administration and one place, cannot prevent a reader from calling up a forbidden text from somewhere faraway, beyond the censor's rule. A caveat, however: the censor can employ the Internet as his own instrument and punish the reader after the act. In 2005 the Internet giant Yahoo! provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a journal­ist, Shi Tao, for supposedly using a New York—based website to obtain and post forbidden texts, for which he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.¹⁵⁸

But in spite of such dangers, examples of the freedom offered by the Web are numerous. In Iran, under the tyranny of the mullahs, students could still read on-line all kinds of forbidden literature; in Cuba, dissidents have Internet access to the published reports of Amnesty

International and other human rights organizations; in Rhodesia, readers can open onscreen the books of banned writers.

And even paper and ink can sometimes survive a death sentence. One of the lost plays of Sophocles is The Loves ofAchilles, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillag­ing and fires or excluded from library catalogues because perhaps the librarian deemed the play of little interest or of poor literary quality. A few words were, however, miraculously preserved. "In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia," Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play The Invention of Love, "in the last gut­tering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children."¹⁵⁹1 trust that book-burners' dreams are haunted by such modest proof of the book's survival.

THE LIBRARY

AS SHAPE

Let no one enter who does not know geometry.

Inscription on Plato's door, at the Academy at Athens

The first view I had of what was to be my library was one of rocks and dust covering a rectangular space of approximately six by thirteen metres. The toppled stones lay between the pigeon tower and the furnace room that was to become my study; powdery sand show­ered the leaves of the creeper every time a bird settled on the dividing wall. The architect who eventually drew the library's plans (fortunately for me) lives in the village. She insisted that traditional methods be used to clean the wall and rebuild the space, and she contracted masons knowledgable in the handling of the local stone, tuffeau, which is soft as sandstone and the colour of butter. It was an extraordinary sight to see these men work row by row, placing stone next to stone with the ability of skilled typographers in an old-fashioned printing shop. The image came to mind because in local parlance the large stones are known as upper case (majuscules) and the small ones as lower case (minuscules), and during the

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The amicable Toronto Reference Library.

building of the library it seemed utterly appropriate that these inheritors of the bricklayers of Babel should mix stones and letters in their labours. "Passe-moi une majus­cule!" they would call to one another, while my books waited silently in their boxes for the day of resurrection.

Books lend a room a particular identity that can, in some cases, usurp that of their owner—a peculiarity well known to oafish personalities who demand to be por­trayed against the background of a book-lined wall, in the hope that it will grant them a scholarly lustre. Seneca mocked ostentatious readers who relied on such walls to lend them intellectual prestige; he argued for possessing only a small number of books, not "endless bookshelves for the ignorant to decorate their dining-rooms."¹⁶⁰ In turn, the space in which we keep our books changes our relationship to them. We don't read books in the same way sitting inside a circle or inside a square, in a room

OPPOSITE TOP: The King's Library in Buckingham House in London. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: The semi-cylindrical ceiling ofthe Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona.

with a low ceiling or in one with high rafters. And the mental atmosphere we create in the act of reading, the imaginary space we construct when we lose ourselves in the pages of a book, is confirmed or refuted by the phys­ical space of the library, and is affected by the distance of the shelves, the crowding or paucity of books, by quali­ties of scent and touch and by the varying degrees of light and shade. "Every librarian is, up to a certain point, an architect," observed Michel Melot, director of the Centre Pompidou Library in Paris. "He builds up his collection as an ensemble through which the reader must find a path, discover his own self, and live."¹⁶¹

The library I had imagined for my books, long before its walls were erected, already reflected the way in which I wished to read. There are readers who enjoy trapping a story within the confines of a tiny enclosure; others for whom a round, vast, public space better allows them to imagine the text stretching out towards far horizons;

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ABOVE: Design for the library of the brain-shaped Freie Universitat in Berlin.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM: The book-shaped towers ofthe Bibliotheque de France, Paris.

others still who find pleasure in a maze of rooms through which they can wander, chapter after chapter. I had dreamt of a long, low library where there would always be enough darkness around the pools of light on the desk to suggest that it was night outside, a rectangular space in which the walls would mirror one another and in which I could always feel as if the books on either side were almost at arm's length. I read in a haphazard way, allow­ing books to associate freely, to suggest links by their mere proximity, to call to one another across the room. The shape I chose for my library encourages my reading habits.

The idea of a library set down on paper, still unpeopled by readers and books, as yet devoid of shelves and partitions, is nothing but the frame of a given style of reading, the

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reduction of an as yet shapeless universe to its minimum expression: pure geometrical form. Square spaces contain and dissect; circular spaces proclaim continuity; other shapes evoke other qualities. The Toronto Reference Library is a progression of ascending disks. The library

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OPPOSITE TOP: Groundplan ofthe Wolfenbuttel Library.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Layoutfora library in a Carolingian monastery, 820.

of Buckingham House (where King George iii kept his books) was octagonal. The first Ambrosiana Library in Milan, lodged in three refurbished houses barely fit for "pigs and cheeky prostitutes,"¹⁶² occupied a narrow rectangle. The library of the Freie Universitat in Berlin was designed by Norman Foster to resemble a skull and is now nicknamed The Brain. The Bibliotheque de France, in Paris, has the shape of an inverted table. The Biblioteca de Catalunya, in Barcelona, is a cylinder cut lengthwise in half. The Wolfenbuttel Library in Germany was designed by the architect Hermann Korb in the shape of an oval. The Freiburg University Library, built in 1902, is in the shape of a triangle.

The first plan we have of a medieval library is a square. Drawn in the Monastery of Reichenau for the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, it dates from around 820 and is divided into two storeys. On the ground floor is the scriptorium, two sides of which are occupied by seven small tables set under the same number of windows, with a large desk in the centre of the room. Above is the storage space for books, from which a corridor leads to the great choir where the liturgical volumes are kept.¹⁶³ The result (barring the corridor and the choir) is a per­fect cube in which the upper section reflects the lower one: the books produced below are stored above, and are in turn used to supply the copyists, in an endless chain of literary reproduction. We do not know whether this plan was ever carried out, but for the anonymous architect the harmonious shape of the square must have seemed the perfect space for the creation, preservation and consulta­tion of books.

A library of straight angles suggests division into parts or subjects, consistent with the medieval notion of a compartmentalized and hierarchical universe; a circular library more generously allows the reader to imagine that every last page is also the first. Ideally, for many readers, a library would be a combination of both, an intersection of circle and rectangle or oval and square, like the ground floor of a basilica. The idea is not a new one.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Royal Library of France had grown from the private collection established by Louis xi in the fifteenth cen­tury to a vast assembly of collections, the result of dona­tions, booty and the royal decree of depot legal, signed in December 1537, requiring that two copies of every book printed in France be deposited at the Chateau de Blois.¹⁶⁴ By the time of the French Revolution, it was obvious that this rapidly growing national library required a new home, and over the next century a great number of proposals were put forward to solve the problem of lodging the many books. Certain enthusiasts suggested moving the collection to a pre-existing Paris structure, such as the church of La Madeleine (then under construction), the Louvre (Napoleon signed a decree to this effect, which was never executed), the government offices on the Quai d'Orsay, the Marche aux Veaux, where meat was butchered, or even the Hopital de la Charite, from which the patients would have had to be evacuated. Others imagined erecting new buildings of various styles and sizes, and their proposals, from the most eccentric to the most practical, bear witness to the search for an ideal shape that would allow readers a necessary freedom of movement, and at the same time lend their working space the best influential qualities.

Etienne-Louis Boullee, one of the most imaginative architects of all time, proposed in 1785 a long, high- roofed gallery of gigantic proportions, inspired by the ruins of ancient Greece, in which the rectangle of the gallery would be topped by an arched ceiling, and read­ers would wander up and down long, terraced mezza­nines in search of their volume of choice. The project never went beyond the drafting stage, but little in the design suggested possibilities of privacy and concentra­tion. Boullee's magnificent library had the features of a tunnel, and resembled a passageway more than a stop­ping place, a building intended less for leisured reading than for rapid consultation.

OVERLEAF: Boullee's fantastical design for an ideal library.

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The Salle Labrouste at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Fifty years later, the architect Benjamin Delessert imagined an elliptical library enclosed in a rectangular building, with spokelike shelves radiating from the cen­tre in all directions. The staff would be seated in the middle in order to keep an eye on the readers, but it was objected that "unless the librarian, armed with a tele­scope and a loudspeaker, could be made to turn on an incessantly gyrating pivot,"¹⁶⁵ security would always be wanting. Furthermore, the reading desks, set in the spaces between the shelves, would feel uncomfortably constrained and give the reader a feeling of entrapment or claustrophobia. In spite of the objections, the idea of a centralized service point surrounded by desks and book­shelves never lost its appeal.

Finally, in 1827, the chance vacating of several build­ings on the right bank of the Seine provided planners with a ready-made site. The ancient Hotel Tubeuf, at the corner of Vivienne and Petits-Champs, was abandoned by the Treasury, and at the same time some adjacent houses and shops were conveniently made available to the city. It took the authorities some thirty more years before the plans for the transformation of the locale were accepted. The architect in charge of the final project was Henri Labrouste, who had made his reputation with the renovation of another important Paris library, the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve.¹⁶⁶

Labrouste was aware that a national library is both a monument and a place of everyday common labours, both the symbol of a country's intellectual wealth and the practical space in which ordinary readers need to pursue their craft comfortably and efficiently. The shape and size had therefore to reflect both immensity and inti­macy, majesty and unobtrusive seclusion. Labrouste conceived the main reading room—the library's core— as a circle within a square, or rather as a series of circles looming high above the square of assembled readers— nine round glass domes that allowed sunlight to enter and illuminate the right-angled space below. As in Delessert's project, the librarian surveyed his flock from the middle of the room, from within a banistered booth in which he could turn around as needed. Tall metal columns supported the arches of the domes, giv­ing the interior the look of a winter garden, while five storeys of bookshelves covered the walls on all sides, creating storage for over a million volumes.

Thirty years later, on the other side of the Channel, the new reading room of the British Museum Library in London was being completed according to a similar pattern, except that a single cupola crowned the circular space and the desks radiated from the centre, controlled by the ever-conspicuous librarian. By then, the British Museum (the institution that housed it) had been in existence for over a century and had worked its way through six previous, much-deplored reading rooms. The first had been a narrow, dark room with two small windows which the trustees had ordered, in 1785, to "be appropriated for the reading-room, and that a proper wainscot table, covered with green bays [sic] ... be pre­pared for the same with twenty chairs." The sixth, in use from 1838 to 1857, had consisted of two squarish high rooms with over ten thousand reference books and twenty-four tables. Ventilation was inefficient; readers complained that while their feet were cold, their heads were always too hot. Many suffered from what became known as "Museum headache," and from the unpleas­ant "Museum flea," which one reader said was "larger than any to be found elsewhere except in the receiving rooms of work-houses."¹⁶⁷ The seventh reading room, inaugurated in May 1857, was designed both to avoid these problems and to ensure more space for books. The shape—a circle within a square—had been sug­gested by Antonio Panizzi, the British Museum Lib­rary's most eminent librarian, who once declared that "every shelf and peg and pivot of the new building was thought of and determined in the wakeful hours of the night."¹⁶⁸

Like Panizzi, Labrouste, a keen bibliophile himself, was convinced of the importance of lending this ample space a human measure, even in the areas behind the reading room. In the stacks, the enormous number of books were not only to be housed; they were to remainaccessible to an ordinary reader. The width of each shelving section

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OPPOSITE: The British Library Reading Room, as depicted in The Illustrated London News.

BELOW: The intial sketch of the Reading Room drawn by Pani^^i himself and dated "April 18th г85г."

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The stalls at the Bibliotheque Nationale required no stepladders: their dimensions were determined by the breadth and height ofa man's body.

was therefore determined by an average person's arms' span (so that readers could pull out books on either side without having to move), and the height by the reach of a hand (so that readers would have access to the high­est shelf without requiring steps or a sliding ladder). In spite of the vastness, there was no sense of crowding under the arched glass domes. Though the reading room could accommodate hundreds of readers at one time, each inhabited a private realm, seated at a numbered desk that had been fitted with an inkstand and a pen­holder, and was kept warm in winter by a combination of metal stoves and hot-water radiators that also served as footrests. Having worked both in the Salle Labrouste and in the British Library reading room, I know the mixed feeling of expansion and containment, grandiosity and seclusion, that the combination of square and circle grants such spaces.

Michelangelo's first sketch for the Laurentian Library.

Other shapes imply other physical qualities. A simple rectangle, for instance, can suggest a different kind of limit and endlessness, continuity and separation, as proven by one of the loveliest libraries ever built, the Laurentian Library in Florence. Miraculously, we have a sketch of its conception: a scrap of paper, slightly larger than a dollar bill, kept in the Buonarroti Archives, one corner torn off where the artist perhaps jotted down a quick message. The sketch shows nothing but a rectan­gle of double lines interrupted by a few short strokes rep­resenting, we are told, intermittent stone buttresses. Drawn by the hand of Michelangelo, it is the earliest draft we possess of what would be his "first and most com­pletely realized building and arguably his most original

contribution to Renaissance architecture."¹⁶⁹ Only two words are written on the paper, one above the rectangle, orto (garden) and one below, chiostro (cloister). Though at the beginning of the project the exact site of the library had not been decided upon, once Michelangelo imagined its future shape he was able to give it a precise location as well—the middle section of the main building of the Monastery of San Lorenzo, somewhere between the gar­den and the courtyard cloister.

The idea for a grand monastic library in San Lorenzo, to lodge the superb collection amassed by the Medicis, had been put forward by Cardinal Giulio de' Medici as early as 1519, several years before the actual commission, which, for financial reasons, had to wait until 1523 to be made official. That was the year in which the cardinal became Pope Clement vii. In the eyes of Pope Clement, a library was truly a library: not an ostentatious chamber lined with luxurious volumes, but a place to keep books and make use of the written word, an institution whose purpose was to serve the scholarly public, complementing with its treasures the lesser holdings of the university collections.

Clement was the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnifi­cent, who was to lend his name to the great Medici col­lection. He was the bastard son of Giuliano de' Medici and his mistress Fioretta, but his illegitimacy was ignored by his cousin Pope Leo x, who, dismissing all objections, made him Archbishop of Florence as well as cardinal. Though lacking the political talents of his grandfather, Clement was, like him, a man of letters and a lover of fine art. He doggedly opposed the move­ments of reform spreading throughout the Catholic

Church, and implemented the measures taken against Luther and the Protestant princes in Germany. He was above all a Medici and a Florentine, strongly set against change, a ruler who sought instead to claim the social and artistic comforts of his position. An ambitious but discriminating patron, he supported writers such as Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli, and artists such as Benvenuto Cellini, Raphael and Michelangelo.¹⁷⁰

Clement was a connoisseur, not a mere admirer of the works he commissioned. The correspondence between him and Michelangelo, from the beginning of the build­ing of the library to its completion, bears witness to his detailed preoccupation. For three full years, from 1523 to 1526, Pope Clement in Rome and Michelangelo in Florence exchanged letters three or four times a week. In letter after letter, Clement suggested to Michelangelo—though papal suggestions carried the weight of orders—all manner of arrangements and dis­positions: that the Latintexts be separated from the Greek, that rare books be kept in small individual cabi­nets, that the foundations of the building be reinforced, that the ceiling be vaulted to help prevent fires. With nagging concern, he insisted on knowing everything: how many desks Michelangelo was planning for the reading room, how many books could be kept on each desk, where Michelangelo intended to obtain the wal­nut for the tables and by what process the wood was to be treated. He offered opinions on everything, from the design of the doors to the importance of the lighting, on where the best travertine could be found to make lime and how many coats of stucco should be applied to the walls. Most of the time, Michelangelo responded read­ily and diplomatically, sometimes accepting these sug­gestions and sometimes ignoring them completely.¹⁷¹

Conservative in politics, Clement was more open to innovation in matters of design, but he remained a practical man. When Michelangelo explained that he wanted to light the library vestibule through circular skylights, Clement expressed delight at the idea but observed that at least two persons would have to be employed "just to keep the glass clean."¹⁷² However, Michelangelo (whose stubbornness was one of his most notorious traits) did not wait for the pope 's agreement on everything, and started raising the walls in December 1525, three months before the final design was approved by His Holiness.

When Michelangelo received the commission for the library in November 1523, he was forty-eight years old. Celebrated throughout Europe, he was in the eyes of patrons and fellow artists a painter, sculptor, architect and poet whose talents were beyond question. In all these areas, he coupled the physical world to the world of thought, so that the laws of one intermingled with the laws of the other. For Michelangelo, the properties of wood and marble were mirrored in the properties of imagination and reason; in his eyes, aesthetics and physics, ethics and mathematics shared the same matter and substance. In an unfinished sonnet composed around the time of his work at San Lorenzo, he wrote:

Since no piece of wood can preserve

Its proper moisture out of its proper place,

It cannot help, touched even slightly by some great heat,

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The monumental staircase ofthe Laurentian Library, designed by Michelangelo.

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Being dried up or bursting into flame or burning.

Just like the heart, taken by one who will never return it,

Living in tears and fed by flames—

Now that it's far from its home and proper place,

What blow will not be fatal to it?¹⁷³

Michelangelo's confidence in the ability of material things to reproduce or translate thought and feeling according to objective rules is evident in the Laurentian Library. Three separate building commissions were entrusted to him. The first, the fagade of San Lorenzo, was never completed. The second, the Medici Chapel interior, was a project he undertook belatedly, after other artists had worked on it for years, and though he achieved some of his best work here, his contribution remained only partial. However, the third, the library, is entirely Michelangelo's own creation.

Since the library was to be used primarily as a work­place, the interior was given greater aesthetic importance than the exterior. Erected (due to the fear of floods) on the third floor, it consists of an entrance vestibule, a magnificent and startlingly original staircase, and a lofty reading room that seemingly stretches towards a point of perspective on the hidden horizon. The entire space of the library is built out of rectangles: the columned open­ings on the walls holding the windows, open or blind; the rows of desks on either side of the room; the majestic central aisle; the divided and carved ceiling. It is easy to imagine the effect created by the great illuminated codexes or the smaller octavo volumes open on the inclined desktops, duplicated by equal rectangular shapes on walls, floor and ceiling, so that every element of the architecture and decoration recalls for the reader the inti­mate relationship between the world and the book, the unlimited physical space which, in the library, is divided into pagelike areas. The central motif of the carved wooden ceiling of the vestibule is, however, not a rectan­gle, but four interlinked circles representing the Medici diamond ring, a pattern repeated in the yellow and red tiled floor of the library itself, reminding readers of the four related corners of God's universe, reflected in God's word penned by the four Evangelists.