Library at Night

A seventeenth-century portrait of Vlad Dracul or Vladislaus Dracula, recently discovered in the Wurtenberg State Library, Germany.

Image not available

Count Dracula's seat is in Transylvania. This is his umbilicus mundi, the navel of his world, the landscape that feeds his imagination, if not his body, since as time goes by it becomes difficult for him to find fresh blood in his native mountains, and he is forced to seek material nourishment abroad. "I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London," says the count, "to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is."³⁴³ But wherever Dracula travels, he cannot be wholly parted from his home. The books on his dusty shelves chronicle his ancient story; all other libraries hold no interest for him. His castle with its ancestral library is his only real home, and he must always have with him a box­ful (or coffinful) of the native earth in which he is so deeply rooted. Like Antaeus, he must touch his mother earth or die.

I put Bram Stoker's novel away and reach for a sec­ond book, a few shelves above it. It tells the story of another traveller, one whose monstrous features the book hints at but never quite reflects. Like Count Dracula, this wanderer is also a lonely gentleman resolved that no one shall be his master, but unlike the count, he has no illusions about his aristocracy. He has no home, no roots, no ancestry. "I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property,"³⁴⁴ he tells us. He moves through the world like an exile from nowhere; he is a cit­izen of the cosmos because he is a citizen of no place. "I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure,"³⁴⁵ he says in resignation. He teaches himself through books, collecting in his memory a curious and eclectic library. His first readings are vicarious;

he listens to a family of peasants read out loud, some­what implausibly, a philosophical meditation on univer­sal history, C.-F. Volney's Ruins of Empires. "Through this work," he explains, "I obtained a cursory knowl­edge of history, and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth." He wonders how human beings can be "at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnifi­cent, yet so vicious and base?" For this he has no answer, but even though he feels he is "not even of the same nature as man,"³⁴⁶ he nevertheless loves humankind and wishes to belong to the human realm. A lost suitcase full of clothes and books provides him with a few other readings: Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. From Werther he learns "despondency and gloom," from Plutarch "high thoughts." But Paradise Lost moves him with a sense of wonder. "As I read," he says, "I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none."³⁴⁷ In spite of finding glimmers of his own story in the story of the fallen Adam, this bewildered reader finds that, however much he reads, human libraries do not account for him. Notwithstanding his eagerness to be part of the universal audience, this citizen of the world will be hounded from the world, will be scorned as a foreigner in every sense, as a creature beyond the pale of every society. Miserable, feared and hated, he will cause the death of his own maker, and finally Dr. Frankenstein's monster will lose himself forever in the ice of the North Pole, inside the frozen blank page known as Canada, the dumping ground of so many of the world's fantasies.

Frankenstein's monster is both the utter foreigner and the perfect world citizen; he is alien in every way, a hor­ror to look upon, and yet made up of all manner of human pieces. Learning like a child for the first time the nature of the world and of himself, he is the archetypal lector virgo, the curious being willing to be taught by the open page, a visitor to the library of the world carrying no prejudices or experience to colour his reading. When the monster enters the blind hermit's cottage, he pro­nounces these words: "Pardon the intrusion. ... I am a traveller in want of a little rest." A traveller for whom there are no borders, no nationalities, no limitations of space, because he belongs nowhere, the monster must even excuse himself for entering a world into which he has not willingly come, promoted from darkness, in the words of Milton's Adam.³⁴⁸ 1 find the phrase "Pardon the intrusion" unbearably moving.

For Frankenstein's monster, the world as described in books is monothematic; all volumes are from the same library. Though he travels from place to place— Switzerland, the Orkneys, Germany, Russia, England and the wilds of Tartary—he sees not the particularities but the common traits of these societies. For him, the world is almost featureless. He deals in abstracts, even though he learns details from various books of history. "I read of men concerned in public affairs governing or

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Illustration by Chevalier for the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.

massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue arise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of these terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone."³⁴⁹ And yet these lessons will prove fruitless. Human libraries, the monster will learn, contain for him only alien literature.

At home in a single place and at home in the world are two notions that can both be experienced as negative. Count Dracula trusts only his private library. He prides himself on being boyar (belonging to the Russian nobil­ity), and can scornfully list a number of nationalities he is not. Frankenstein's monster, having no library of his own, looks for his reflection in every book he encoun­ters, and yet never succeeds in recognizing his own story in those "foreign" pages.

And yet the possibility of a greater and deeper experi­ence was always there for either of them. Seneca, echo­ing Stoic notions from four hundred years earlier, denied that the only books that should matter to us are those of our contemporaries and fellow citizens. According to Seneca, we can pick from any library whatever books we wish to call ours; each reader, he tells us, can invent his own past. He observed that the common assumption— that our parents are not of our choosing—is in fact untrue; we have the power to select our own ancestry. "Here are families with noble endowments," he writes, pointing at his bookshelf. "Choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become. . . . This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather than transforming it into immortality." Whoever realizes this, says Seneca, "is exempt from the limitations of human­ity; all ages are at his service as at the service of a god. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollection. Is time now present? He makes use of it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into one, makes his life long."³⁵⁰ For Seneca, it was not the notion of superiority that mattered (Plutarch made fun of those who considered the moon of Athens superior to the moon of Corinth³⁵¹) but that of communality, the sharing among all human beings of one common reason under one divine logos. As a consequence, he widened the circle of the self to embrace not only family and friends but also enemies and slaves, as well as barbarians or foreigners, and ultimately the whole of humanity.

Centuries later, Dante was to apply this definition to himself: "As fish have water, I have the world as my home."³⁵² He added that though he loved his native Florence to the point of suffering exile for her cause, he could truthfully say, after reading many poets and prose writers, that the earth was full of other places more noble and more beautiful. His vigorous belief in a cosmopolitan library allowed Dante to affirm an independent national identity, yet to see the world as his patrimony and foun- tainhead. For the cosmopolitan reader a homeland is not in space, fractured by political frontiers, but in time, which has no borders. This was why Erasmus, two centuries after Dante, praised Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer, for providing readers with a "library without walls," in the shape of his octavo volumes of the classics.³⁵³

The cosmopolitan library also lies at the core of Jewish culture. For the Jews, born within an oral tradition, it is paradoxically the Book—the revealed word of God— that stands at the centre of their intellectual and religious experience. For them, the Bible is itself a library, the most complete and reliable library of all, everlasting and all-encompassing, rooted in time and therefore pos­sessed of a constant existence past, present and future. Its words carry more weight than the futile scourges of age and human change, so that even after the destruction of the Second Temple, in a.d. 70, the rabbinical scholars of the Diaspora would discuss in their distant synagogues, as instructed by the Book, the physical rules of conduct to be observed within a building that no longer had a physical being.³⁵⁴ To believe that the library holds a truth greater than that of the time and place in which we stand: this is the intellectual or spiritual allegiance that Seneca was arguing for. This too was the argument held by the Arab scholars of the Middle Ages, for whom libraries existed both "in time, making present the past Greek and Arab ages as exemplary cultural models, and in space, gathering what was dispersed and bringing near what was far away. . . . They rendered visible the invisible, and were concerned with possessing the world."³⁵⁵

Jean Jacques Rousseau was of two minds about this ecumenical sentiment. In Emile he argued that the words patrie (fatherland) and citoyen (citizen) should be deleted from every modern language. But he also insisted, "Distrust those cosmopolitans who seek in the depths of their books the duties they scorn to perform at home. This kind of philosopher professes love for the Tartars, in order to be excused from loving his neighbours."³⁵⁶ Sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, the poet Thomas Traherne penned what we can read today as a premature answer to Rousseau, in a manuscript that remained unpublished for two hundred and fifty years, until it was discovered by chance in a London bookstall and bought for a few pence by a curious collector. Traherne wrote, "You will never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and per­ceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you."³⁵⁷

The notion of a cosmopolitan past was with us for many centuries, perhaps until the pre-Raphaelites intro­duced the idea of anachronism, a barrier separating what belonged to our present from what belonged to ages gone by. For Sir Thomas Browne or for Erasmus, Plato and Aristotle were fellow debaters. Platonic and Aristotelian ideas were renewed in the minds of Montaigne and Petrarch, and the dialogue was continued throughout the generations, not on a vertical timeline but on a horizontal plane, along the same circular path to knowledge. "Whatever meant reality to our ances­tors persists, and is hidden in every kind of art," says the Emperor Augustus in Hermann Broch's The Death ofVirgil.™

"For as though there were a Metempsuchosis," wrote Sir Thomas Browne in 1642, "and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain Revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them. To see our selves again, we need not look for Plato's year: every man is not only himself; there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are liv'd over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self."³⁵⁹ For Browne the past is made contemporary through our reading and thinking; the past is a bookshelf open to all, an infinite source of that which then becomes ours by worthy appropriation. There are no copyright laws here, no legal boundaries, no picket fences with the sign "Private, Keep Out."

Closer to our time, the philosopher Richard Rorty drew the following conclusion from Browne 's cosmopolitan vision of history. "The best a prophet or a demiurge can hope for is to say once again what has often been said, but to say it just a little bit better."³⁶⁰ The past is the cos­mopolitan's mother country, the universal fatherland, an endless library. In it (so thought Sir Thomas Browne) lies our hope for an endurable future.

At about the same time as Browne was writing these words in his Religio Medici, Gabriel Naude, in his Advice for Setting Up a Library, was rejoicing in the riches a library could afford:

For if it is possible to enjoy in this world a certain sovereign good, a certain perfect and accomplished happiness, I believe that there is none more desirable than the dialogue and the fruitful and pleasant entertainment that a wise man might receive from such a Library, and that it is not so strange a thing to possess Books, ut illi sint coena- tionum ornamenta, quam ut studiorum instrumenta. Since he can right­fully call himself because of it a cosmopolitan or citizen of the whole world, he can know everything, see everything and ignore nothing; in brief, since he is absolute master of this contentment, he can use it as he pleases, take it when he wants to, converse with it as much as he likes, and without obstacles, without labours and without effort he can be instructed and know all the most precise character­istics of Everything that is, that was and that may be/ On earth, in the sea, in the uttermost hiding-places of the Heavens.³⁶¹

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CONCLUSION

Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality. I deeply regret never having possessed a library of my own.

Varlam Chalamov, My Libraries

We have always wanted to remember more, and we will continue, I believe, to weave webs to catch words in the hope that somehow, in the sheer quantity of accumulated utterances, in a book or on a screen, there will be a sound, a phrase, a spelled-out thought that will carry the weight of an answer. Every new technology has advan­tages over the previous one, but necessarily lacks some of its predecessor's attributes. Familiarity, which no doubt breeds contempt, breeds also comfort; that which is unfamiliar breeds distrust. My grandmother, born in the Russian countryside at the end of the nineteenth cen­tury, was afraid of using that new invention called the telephone when it was first introduced to her neighbour­hood in Buenos Aires, because, she said, it didn't allow her to see the face of the person she was speaking to. "It makes me think of ghosts," she explained.

Electronic text that requires no page can amicably accompany the page that requires no electricity; they need not exclude each other in an effort to serve us best. Human imagination is not monogamous nor does it need to be, and new instruments will soon sit next to the PowerBooks that now sit next to our books in the multi­media library. If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything. Alexandria modestly saw itself as the centre of a circle bound by the knowable world; the Web, like the definition of God first imagined in the twelfth century,'⁶² sees itself as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

And yet the new sense of infinity created by the Web has not diminished the old sense of infinity inspired by the ancient libraries; it has merely lent it a sort of tangible intangibility. There may come a new technique of col­lecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness, like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul.

Solid libraries of wood and paper, or libraries of ghostly flickering screens, stand as proof of our resilient belief in a timeless, far-reaching order that we dimly intuit or perceive. During the Czech insurrection against the Nazis in May 1945, when Russian troops were enter­ing Prague, the librarian Elena Sikorskaja, Vladimir Nabokov's sister, realized that the German officers now attempting to retreat had not returned several of the books they had borrowed from the library she worked in. She and a colleague decided to reclaim the truant volumes, and set out on a rescue mission through the streets down which the Russian trucks were victoriously bundling. "We reached the house of a German pilot who returned the books quite calmly," she wrote to her brother a few months later. "But by now they would let no one cross the main road, and everywhere there were Germans with machine guns,"'⁶' she complained. In the midst of the confusion and chaos, it seemed important to her that the library's pathetic attempt at order should, as far as possible, be preserved.

However appealing we may find the dream of a knowable universe made of paper and a meaningful cos­mos made of words, a library, even one colossal in its proportions or ambitious and infinite in its scope, can never offer us a "real" world, in the sense in which the daily world of suffering and happiness is real. It offers us instead a negotiable image of that real world which (in the words of the French critic Jean Roudaut) "kindly allows us to conceive it,"'⁶⁴ as well as the possibility of experience, knowledge and memory of something intu­ited through a tale or guessed at through a poetic or philosophical reflection.

Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world or the things that are in the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."'⁶⁵ This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language—all this finds its material manifesta­tion in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.

In her novel The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald says, "If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching."'⁶⁶ The story of my library certainly began with finding: finding my books, finding the place in which to lodge them, finding the quiet in the space lit under the darkness outside. But if the story must end with searching, the question has to be: searching for what? Northrop Frye once observed that, had he been present at the birth of Christ, he did not think he would have heard the angels singing. "The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped."'⁶⁷ Therefore, I am not searching for revelation of any kind, since anything said to me is necessarily limited by what I'm capable of hearing and understanding. Not for knowledge beyond what, in some secret way, I already know. Not for illumi­nation, to which I can't reasonably aspire. Not for expe­rience, since ultimately I can only become aware of what is already in me. For what, then, do I search, at the end of my library's story?

Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps consolation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Those who read, those who

tell us what they read, Those who noisily turn

the pages of their books, Those who have power over red and black ink, and over pictures, Those are the ones who lead us,

guide us, show us the way.

Aztec Codex from 1524, Vatican Archives

While writing this book, I have contracted many debts. In the alphabetical order dear to libraries, my thanks:

To my friends and colleagues Enis Batur, Anders Bjornsson, Antoine Boulad, Roberto Calasso, Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, Viviane Flament, Dieter Hein, Chris Herschdorfer, Patricia Jaunet, Marie Korey, Richard Landon, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Hubert Nyssen, Felicidad Orqum, Lucie Pabel and Gottwalt Pankow, Dominique Papon, Fabrice Pataut, Arturo Ramoneda, Sylviane Sambord, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, Maud Stephan-Hachem, Jean-Luc Terradillos.

To the staff of the London Library and of the Mediatheque de Poitiers, and to Anne-Catherine Sutermeister and Silvia Kimmeier of the Bibliotheque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne.

To my agents, Michele Lapautre in Paris, Guillermo Schavelzon in Barcelona, Ruth Weibel in Zurich,

Bruce Westwood and Nicole Winstanley and the staff at Westwood Creative Artists in Toronto.

To Gena Gorrell, whose critical, unrelenting, meticu­lous reading cleared the book of a vast number of errors and fatuities. To Deirdre Molina, for her painstaking care in following the book from manuscript to print. To C.S. Richardson, for another splendid book design. To Liba Berry, for the excellent proofread. To Michelle MacAleese, for her thorough photo research. To Barney Gilmore, for the comprehensive index.

To my editors, Rosellina Arquinto, Hans-Jurgen Balmes, Valeria Ciompi, Carmen Criado, Haye Konings- veld, Luiz Schwarcz, Marie-Catherine Vacher and, first and foremost, overriding the laws of the alphabet, Louise Dennys.

328

Finally, I'm deeply grateful to the S. Fischer Stiftung in Berlin and to the Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York for their financial assistance over the past years, without which this book would no doubt be still languishing in the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Notes

foreword

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Pulvis et Umbra," II, in Across the Plains (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892).

Northrop Frye, Notebook 3:128, in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by Robert D. Denham (Toronto: Anansi, 2004).

Francesco Petrarca, "On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others," in Invectives, ed. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003).

the library as myth

M. le Comte de Mondion, "Mondion, le chateau—la paroisse, 1096—1908," in Bulletins de la Societe des Antiquaires de I'Ouest (Poitiers, second quarter of 1909).

R.L. Stevenson (in collaboration with Mrs. Stevenson), "The Dynamiter," in More New Arabian Nights (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885).

Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations,

ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968).

Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), ed. J.D. Duff, IX:973 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1988).

Essais de Montaigne, ed. Amaury-Duval (Paris: Chasseriau, 1820).

Ibid.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains, II:2o6, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (New York: Harper, 1853).

Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library," in The Essays ofVirginia Woolf, Volume ii, 1912-1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987).

Genesis 11:5-7.

Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. I (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Strabo, Geography, Book XIII, quoted by Luciano Canfora, "Aristote, 'fondateur' de la Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie," in La nou- velle Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie, ed. Fabrice Pataut (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2003).

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, translated by and with an intro­duction by John Healy (London: Penguin, 1991); Book XII, 69-70.

Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1987).

Charles A. Goodrum & Helen W. Dalrymple, Guide to the Library of Congress, rev. edition (Washington: Library of Congress, 1988).

Christoph Kapeller, "L'architecture de la nouvelle Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie," in Pataut, La nouvelle Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie.

Hipolito Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandria (Madrid: Gredos, 2001).

Mustafa El-Abbadi, La antigua biblioteca de Alejandna: Viday destino, trans. Jose Luis Garda-Villalba Sotos (Madrid: unesco, 1994).

Strabo, Geography, Book XVII.

Franz Kafka, Die Er^ahlungen: Originalfassung (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2000).

See Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, Book XXI:9 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984).

Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandna.

Quoted in Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa.

Geo. Haven Putnam, A.M., Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, Vol. I (reprint) (New York: Hillary House, 1962).

"Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un beau livre," Stephane Mallarme, in "Reponses a des enquetes, Sur l'evolution litteraire," in Proses diverses (Paris: Gallimard, 1869).

Joseph Brodsky, "In a Room and a Half," in Less Than One (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).

I discuss this project in my chapter "Peter Eisenman: The Image As Memory," in Reading Pictures (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

Quoted in Escolar Sobrino, La biblioteca de Alejandna.

Quoted in Roberto Calasso, I quarantanove gradini (Milano: Adelphi, 1991).

These references are from Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa.

"Polvo seran, mas polvo enamorado," Francisco de Quevedo, in "Amor constante meas alla de la muerte," in Antolog^a poetica (selected by, and with a prologue by, Jorge Luis Borges) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982).

the library as order

Pepys bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, exactly three thousand numbered volumes, beginning with the smallest and ending with the largest.

Pliny the Younger, Letters I-X, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, II:i7:8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

"Sa chambre de douleur etait un arc-en-ciel. . . reservant a l'oeil et au souvenir des surprises et des bonheurs attendus," Michel Melot, in La sagesse du bibliothecaire (Paris: L'oeil neuf editions, 2004).

Georges Perec, in Penser/Classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985).

Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library."

John Wells, Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library (Macmillan: London, i99i).

Terry Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1985).

G.K. Chesterton, "Lunacy and Letters," in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, selected by Alberto Manguel (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000).

Jean-Pierre Drege, Les bibliotheques en Chine au temps des manu- scrits (Paris: Ecole fran^aise d'Extreme-Orient, 1991).

W.F. Mayers, "Bibliography of the Chinese Imperial Collection of Literature," China Review, Vol. VI, no. 4 (London, 1879).

Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Foucault considers this kind of eclectic list a "distortion of classifica­tion that prevents us from conceiving it [the classification]" ("cette distorsion du classement qui nous empeche de lepenser").

Wolfgang Bauer, "The Encyclopaedia in China," Cahiers d'his- toire mondiale, Vol. IX, no. 3 (Paris, 1966).

Sergei A. Shuiskii, "Khallikan," in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, Vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, i986).

El-Abbadi, La Antigua biblioteca de Alexandria.

Dorothy May Norris, A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods: iioo-i85o, with an Introductory Survey of Ancient Times (London: Grafton & Co., 1939).

Houari Touati, L'armoire a sagesse: Bibliotheques et collections en Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2003).

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D.

Hicks, Vol. 1:57 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1972).

Youssef Eche, Less bibliotheques arabespubliques et semi-publiques en Mesopotamie, en Syrie et en Egypte au Moyen-age (Damascus: Institut fran^ais de Damas, 1967).

Touati, L'armoire a sagesse.

Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist ofal-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

D. Mallet, "La bibliotheque d'Avicenne," in Studia Islamica, Vol. 83, 1996. Quoted in Touati, L'armoire a sagesse.

Suetonius, "Julius Caesar," in The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1989).

Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).

T. Birt, Die Buchrolle in der Kunst (Leipzig, 1907).

Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, M.A. F.R.S., ed. Henry B. Wheatley F.S.A. (19 December, 1666), (London: George Bell & Sons, 1899).

Melvil Dewey, "Decimal Classification Beginning," in Library Journal45 (2/15/20). Quoted in Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago and London: American Library Association, 1996).

The latest revision of Dewey's system, the XXI edition of 1998, has altered some of these classifications, so that now, while 200 is still attributed to Religion and 260 to Christian theology, 264 is reserved for Public Worship, and God can be found under three different headings: 211 (Concepts of God), 212 (Existence and Attributes) and 231 (Trinity and Divine Nature). See Lois Mai Chan, John P. Comaromi, Mohinder P. Satija, Classification decimale de Dewey: guide pratique (Montreal: Editions ASTED, 1995).

Dewey's reading notebook entries, quoted in Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer.

Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend.

Dewey's reading notebook entries, quoted in Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer.

The Spanish method of granting priority to the father's surname, e.g., Garda, doesn't work if the author is known by his second surname.

Henry Green, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (London: The Hogarth Press, 1940).

the library as space

Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Paris: Hetzel, 1870). This same passage, in a similar context, is quoted by Perec in Penser/Classer. I am grateful to Cyril de Pins for pointing it out to me.

Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement ofBooks.

A.N.L. Munby, Some Caricatures of Book-Collectors: An Essay (London: privately printed, 1948); quoted in Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement ofBooks.

Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889), in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1922).

Emanuele Tesauro, Ilcannocchiale aristotelico (1670) (Savigliano: Editrice artistica Piemontese, 2000).

Anthony Grafton, "Une bibliotheque humaniste: Ferrare," in Le pouvoir des bibliotheques: La memoire des livres en Occident, under the direction of Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel,

i99⁶⁾.

Quoted in Grafton, "Une bibliotheque humaniste: Ferrare." 74.Ibid.

Robert D. McFadden, "Recluse buried by paper avalanche," in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 31 December, 2003).

See Nicholson Baker, "The Author vs. the Library," The New Yorker (New York, 14 October, 1996).

Goodrum & Dalrymple, Guide to the Library of Congress.

Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001).

Quoted in Baker, Double Fold, p. 257.

Robin McKie and Vanessa Thorpe, "Digital Domesday Book," in The Observer (London, 3 March, 2002).

Katie Hafner, "Memories on Computers May Be Lost to Time," in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 28 November, 2004).

Robert F. Worth, "Collecting the world's books online," in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 1—2 March, 2003).

The New York Times (14 December, 2004).

Genesis 11:1—9.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, I:i (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (London: Dent, 1872).

Gabriel Naude, Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque, seconde edition revue corrigee & augmentee (Paris: Chez Rolet le Duc, 1644).

Marie-Catherine Rey, "Figurer l'etre des hommes," in Visions du futur: Une histoire despeurs et des espoirs de l'humanite (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 2000).

Quoted in P.N. Furbank, Diderot (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1992).

Jean-Francois Marmontel, in his Memoirs, quoted in Furbank, Diderot.

"Le but de l' Encyclopedie est de rassembler les connaissances eparses sur la surface de la terre; d'en exposer le systeme general aux hommes qui viendront apres nous, afin que les travaux des sieclespasses n'aientpas ete des travaux inutilespour les siecles a venir. . . . Que

l' Encyclopedie devienne un sanctuaire ou les connaissances des hommes soient a l'abri des temps et des revolutions." Denis Diderot, in "Encyclopedie," in D. Diderot et Jean d'Alembert, L'Encyclopedie,

ou, Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers (Paris, ¹75^1—7²⁾.

Guillaume Grivel, L'lsle inconnue, ou Memoires du chevalier de Gastines. Recueillis etpubliespar M. Grivel, des Academies de Dijon, de La Rochelle, de Rouen, de la Societe Philosophique de Philadelphie etc. (Paris: Moutard, 1783-87).

Quoted in Furbank, Diderot.

Ibid.

Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Time, Space andEadweard Muybridge (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).

Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy ofSeneca: Essays and Letters, trans­lated by and with an introduction by Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, i958).

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet (Paris: Mercure de France,

i923).

Jorge Luis Borges, "La biblioteca total," in Sur (Buenos Aires, August 1939), later developed as "La Biblioteca de Babel," in Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944).

Idem, Elcongreso (Buenos Aires: El Archibrazo, 1971).

the library as power

Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Rahman al-'Uthmani, Idah al-ta'rif bi- ba'd fada'ilal-'ilm al-sharif, Princeton University Library, Yahuda Ms. No. 4293, quoted in Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, i992).

Quoted in Hipolito Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas (Madrid: Fundacion German Sanchez Ruiperez, 1985).

Fritz Milkau, Handbuch der Bibliothekswissenschaft, ed. Georg Leyh (Wiesbaden: G. Harrassowitz, 1952).

Emile Zola, L'assommoir.

Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Le passage (Paris: Laffont, 1994).

Juan Domingo Peron, "Discurso del Presidente de la Nacion Argentina General Juan Peron pronunciado en la Academia Argentina de Letras con motivo del Dfa de la Raza y como homenaje en memoria de Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra en el cuarto centenario de su nacimiento" (Buenos Aires, 12 October, 1947).

Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.

Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays, ed. Edward C. Kirkland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

Long Overdue: A Library Reader, ed. Alan Taylor (London and Edinburgh: The Library Association Publishing and Mainstream Publishing Company, 1993).

Thomas Carlyle, letter dated 18 May, 1832, in The Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London: Macmillan, 1888).

Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Quoted in John K. Winkler, Incredible Carnegie (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931).

Thomas Morrison, "Rights of Land," unpublished manuscript quoted in Peter Krass, Carnegie (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

Quoted in Wall, Andrew Carnegie.

Krass, Carnegie.

Andrew Carnegie, speech at Grangemouth, Scotland, September 1887, quoted in Burton J. Hendrick, The Life ofAndrew Carnegie (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1932).

Quoted in Krass, Carnegie.

Quoted in Winkler, Incredible Carnegie.

Krass, Carnegie.

Quoted in George S. Bobinski, Carnegie Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1969).

Krass, Carnegie.

Andrew Carnegie, Round the World (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1884).

John Updike, "I Was a Teen-Age Library User," in Odd Jobs (London: Andre Deutsch, i992).

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, i984).

H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fourth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924).

Quoted in Bobinski, Carnegie Libraries. the library as shadow

Archibald MacLeish, "Of the Librarian's Profession," in A Time to Speak (London: Faber, 1941).

Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London: George Allen & Unwin,

1964).

David Diringer, The Book before Printing (New York: Dover, 1982).

Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.

Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas.

Jean Bottero, Mesopotamie. L'ecriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.

He was also the celebrated author of a treatise on the prostitutes of Attica.

Escolar, Historia de las bibliotecas.

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken, 1984).

Brodsky, "To Please a Shadow," in Less Than One.

Eduardo Anguita and Martm Caparros, La voluntad: Una histo­ria de la militancia revolucionaria en la Argentina 1973-1976, Volume II (Buenos Aires: Norma, 1998).

Varlam Chalamov, Mes bibliotheques, trans. Sophie Benech (Paris: Editions Interferences, 1988).

"Tiene hijos que lo vieron quemar sus libros," in German Garcia, La fortuna (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 2004).

Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Don't Count the Pope among Harry Potter Fans," in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 16—17 July, 2005).

William Blake, "The Everlasting Gospel" a.I.13, in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).

Luciano Canfora, La Bibliotheque du Patriarche: Photius censure dans la France de Ma^arin, trans. Luigi-Alberto Sanchi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003).

See Leo Lowenthal, "Calibans Erbe," in Schriften IV(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984).

The same story is told by the fourteenth-century Tunisian histo­rian Ibn Khaldun, but applied to the Islamic conquest of Persia. According to this version, when General Sa'd ben Waqqas entered the conquered kingdom, he found large numbers of books and asked Omar Ibn al-Kdattab if he should distribute this loot among the faithful. Omar replied, "Throw them into the water! If they hold a guide to the Truth, God has already given us a better one. And if they hold nothing but lies, God will have rid us of them." That, says Ibn Khaldun, is how we lost the knowledge of the Persians. In Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddima: Discours sur l'histoire universelle (Paris: Sindbad, 1967-68).

Thanks to Irving Wardle for suggesting this poem by A.D. Hope, in Collected Poems 1930-1970 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, i97²⁾.

William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru (orig. 1843—1847) (New York: Random House, Modern Library, i986).

Jacques Lafaye, Albores de la imprenta: El libro en Espana y Portugal y sus posesiones de ultramar (siglos XV—XVI) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2002). A maravedi was worth

i4 shillings.

Richard E. Greenleaf, Zumarragay la Inquisicion mexicana 1536-1543, trans. Victor Villela (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1998).

See Miguel Leon Portilla, Elreverso de la conquista (Mexico: Editorial Joaqum Motiz, 1964).

Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espanay Islas de la Tierra Firme, I: Introduction, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, La conquete de l'Amerique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).

Tacitus, Annales, trans. after Burnouf, and annotated by Henri Bornecque (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1965).

Eche, Les bibliotheques arabes publiques et semi-publiques en Mesopotamie.

A large number of the Corvina books were spared because they had been stored in the royal castle of Buda, which the Turks found it unseemly to burn down. See Csaba Csapodi & Klara Csapodi-Gardonyi, Bibliotheca Corviniana (Budapest: Magyar Helikon, 1967).

Johannes Pedersen, Den Arabiske Bog (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, i946).

Le Monde (Paris, 4 September, 1995).

Lawrence Donegan, "Anger as CIA homes in on new target: library users," in The Observer (London, 16 March, 2003).

Richard F. Tomasson, Iceland: The First New Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).

Joseph Kahn, "Yahoo helped Chinese to prosecute journal­ist," in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 8 September, 2005).

the library as shape

Tom Stoppard, The Invention ofLove (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1997); Act I.

Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy ofSeneca.

"Un bibliothecaire est toujours un peu architecte. Il batit sa collection comme un ensemble a travers lequel le lecteur doit circuler, se reconnaitre, vivre." Melot, La sagesse du bibliothecaire.

Angelo Paredi, A History of the Ambrosiana. trans. Constance and Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame, IN: University Press of Notre Dame, i983).

Johannes Duft, The Abbey Library of Saint Gall (St. Gallen: Verlag am Klosterhof, 1990).

Simone Balaye, La bibliotheque nationale des origines a 1800 (Geneva: Droz, 1988).

The objection was made by Count Leon de Laborde, quoted in Bruno Blasselle and Jacqueline Melet-Sanson, La bibliotheque nationale, memoire de l'avenir (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

Blasselle and Melet-Sanson, La bibliotheque nationale.

P.R. Harris, The Reading Room (London: The British Library, i986).

Ibid.

169 William E. Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

H.M. Vaughan, The Medici Popes, Leo X and Clement VII (London: Macmillan, i908).

Rime e lettere diMichelangelo, ed. P. Mastrocola (Turin: UTET, 1992).

Quoted in Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo.

"Quand'avvien c'alcun legno non difenda/il proprio umor fuor del terrestre loco,/nonpuo far c'algran caldo assai opoco/non

si secchi o non s'arda o non s'accenda.// Cosi'l cor, tolto da chi maimel renda,/vissuto inpianto e nutrito di foco,/o ch'e fuor delsuoproprio albergo e loco,/qualmal fie cheper morte non l'offenda?" in Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, ed. E.N. Girardi (Bari: Laterza, i960).

Giorgio Vasari, "Michelangelo Buonarroti," in Lives of the Artists, Vol. I, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, i987).

Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 3d edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1964).

Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World.

See Kenneth Clark, "The Young Michelangelo," in J.H. Plumb, The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (London: Collins, 1961).

Luca Pacioli, Divine Proportion (New York: Abaris, 2005).

the library as chance

Henry James, "The Figure in the Carpet," in Embarrassments (London: William Heinemann, i896).

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Travel," in A Child's Garden of Verses (London: The Bodley Head, i896).

Theodore Monod, Meharees (Arles: Actes Sud, 1989).

A.M. Tolba, Villes de sable: Les cites bibliotheques du desert mau- ritanien (Paris: Hazan, i999).

Pausanias, Guide to Greece, trans. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971); Vol. II, VI:6.

Jacques Gies and Monique Cohen, "Introduction" to Serinde, Terre de Bouddha (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1995).

Susan Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams (ed.), The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (London: British Library, 2004).

Pieces shown in Gies and Cohen, Serinde, Terre de Bouddha, and in Whitfield and Sims-Williams, The Silk Road.

Liu Jung-en, ed., introduction to Six Yuan Plays (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972).

Mark Aurel Stein, Serindia, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921).

Quoted in Whitfield and Sims-Williams, The Silk Road.

the library as workshop

Battista Guarino, "A Program of Teaching and Learning," in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig W. Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997).

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London, 1878).

Cicero, "Cicero to Atticus, April 59," in Selected Letters, trans. D.R. Shackelton Bailey (London: Penguin, 1986).

"Cicero to Atticus, 10 March 45," ibid.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: The Hogarth Press, i929).

N. Sanz and Ruiz de la Pena, La Casa de Cervantes en Valladolid (Valladolid: Fundaciones Vega-Inclan, i993).

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Celina S. de Cortazar and Isa^as Lerner (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1969); I:VI.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Poema de los dones," in El hacedor (Buenos Aires: Emece, i960).

Jorge Luis Borges, "Autobiographical notes," in The New Yorker (New York, 19 September, 1970).

Borges, "Al iniciar el estudio de la gramatica anglosajona," in El hacedor.

Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca.

William Blake, "Milton," Pl.35, 42—45 in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).

Badr al-Din Muhammed Ibn Jama'a, Tadhkirat al-sami,' quoted in Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo.

Nasir al-Din Tusi, Risala, ibid.

Quoted in Robert Irwin, Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, i999).

the library as mind

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Literary Works of Machiavelli, ed. John Hale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

Philippe Aries, Essais sur l'histoire de la mort ven occident: du moyen age a nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

Revelation 20:i2.

See Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo.

Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, Hildesheim, 1981, quoted in Salvatore Settis, "Warburg continuatus," in Le pouvoir des bibliotheques: La memoire des livres en Occident, ed. Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).

Ernst Cassirer, "Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften," in Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg, I, 1921—1922 (Leipzig & Berlin, 1923).

"Ein kleiner Herr mit schwarzem Schnurrbart der manchmal Dialektgeschichten erz^hlt," quoted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, Univer­sity of London, 1970). I have revised Gombrich's English translation.

"dadurch offenbar das Mittelgefunden, mich von einer erschuttern- den Gegenwart, die mich wehrlos machte, abzuziehen. . . . Die Schmerzempfindung reagierte sich ab in der Fantasie des Romantisch- Grausamen. Ich machte da die Schutzjmpfung gegen das aktiv Grausame durch ... ," in Aby Warburg, Notes for Lecture on Serpent Ritual, 1923, pp. 16—18, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (New York: Random House, 1993).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, II:8 in Goethes Werke, Band IX, Autobiographische Schriften I, Ed. Liselotte Blumenthal (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1994).

2i 6. Ernst Cassirer, "Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften."

As Gombrich notes.

"Das Gedachtnis als organisierte Materie," in Ewald Hering, Uber das Gedachtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Lecture, Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna, 30 May, 1870), 3 ed. (Leipzig, 1921).

The story of the controversy is told by Salvatore Settis in "Warburg continuatus," in Quadernistorici, 58/a XX, no. 1, (April i985).

Fritz Saxl, "The History of Warburg's Library (1886—1944)," appendix to Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

"Aalsuppenstil," quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Princip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens, 2d ed. (Leipzig: W. Engelman, 1908).

"GespenstergeschichtefurganЈErwachsene."Aby Warburg, Grundbegriffe, I, p.3, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

"das Nachleben der Antike," quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

"Wie ein Seismograph hatten seine empfindlichen Nerven die unterirdischen Erschutterungen schon dann ver^eichnet, als andere sie noch vollig uberhorten." Carl Georg Heise, in Personliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg (Hamburg: Gesellschaft der Bucherfreunde, 1959).

"Du lebst und tust mir nichts."

"Die Wiederbelebung der damonischen Antike vollzjeht sich dabei, wie wir sahen, durch eine Art polarer Funktion des einfuhlenden Bildgedachtnisses. Wir sind im Zeitalter des Faust, wo sich der moderne Wissenschaftler—zwischen magischer Praktik und kosmologischer Mathematik—den Denkraum der Besonnenheit zwischen sich und dem Objekt zu erringen versuchte." Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, II:534, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

I'm grateful to Professor W.F. Blisset for this information.

"warum das Schicksal den schopferischen Menschen in die Region der ewigen Unruhe verweist, ihm uberlassend ob er seine Bildung im Inferno, Purgatorio oder Paradiso findet." Aby Warburg, in Schlussubung, Notebook 1927—28, pp. 68—69, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

Aby Warburg, Le rituel du serpent: recit d'un voyage en pays pueblo, introduction by Joseph Leo Koerner, text by Fritz Saxl and de Benedetta Cestelli Guidi, trans. Sibylle Muller, Philip Guiton and Diane H. Bodart (Paris: Macula, 2003).

"Die Bilder und Worte sollen fur die Nachkommenden eine Hilfe sein bei dem Versuch der Selbstbesinnung zur Abwehr der Tragik der Gespanntheit zwischen triebhafter Magie und auseinandersetzender Logik. Die Konfession eines (unheilbaren) Schizoiden, den Seelenartz^n ins Archivgegeben."Aby Warburg, Note 7, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

"Annahme des Kunstwerkes als etwas in Richtung auf den Zuschauer feindlich Bewegtes." Aby Warburg, in Fragmente (27 August, 1890).

the library as island

See William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, i989).

W. Jaeger, Aristotle, trans. R. Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).

Plato, "Phaedrus," trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

"They read your will: they choose it to be theirs: they cherish it. They read it without cease and what they read never passes away. For it is your own unchanging purpose that they read, choosing to make it their own and cherishing it for themselves." Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by and with an introduction by

R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961); Book XIII:i5.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen undReflexionen, no. 838 in Goethes Werke, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1981); Vol. XII.

Ecclesiastes i2:i2.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, "Libros y amistad," in La otra aventura (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1968).

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Nicholas de Cusa, "De docta ignorantia," in Selected Spiritual Writings, translated and introduced by H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 2005).

Julie Flaherty, "New Testament on a Chip," in The New York Times (New York, 23 June, 2003).

Announced on the BBC evening news, 26 May, 2003.

The Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book II, chapter XIII, in OperaHistorica, Vol. I, ed. J.E. King (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann Ltd, 1971).

Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996).

Walter Benjamin, Schriften, edited by and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955).

The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 18 January, 1999).

Will Eisner, interview on France Info Radio, broadcast 19 December, 2004.

Paul Duguid, "PG Tips," in The Times Literary Supplement (London, 11 June, 2004).

Garrick Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians (Washington, i893).

"Mucho mas que libros," Semana (Bogota, 4 June, 2001).

Personal interview, Bogota, 25 May, 2001.

Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York and Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980).

the library as survival

Tuvia Borzykowski, Ben kirot noflim, trans. Mosheh Basok (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbuts ha-Meuhad, 1964).

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History ofNazJ Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, i960).

Quoted in Friedman, "The Fate of the Jewish Book," in Roads to Extinction.

Donald E. Collins and Herbert P. Rothfeder, "The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and the Looting of Jewish and Masonic Libraries During World War II," in Journal of Library History 18,

1983.

Founded by the exiled son-in-law of Samuel Fischer, the cele­brated German publisher.

Quoted in Friedman, "The Fate of the Jewish Book," in Roads to Extinction.

Nili Keren, "The Family Camp" in Anatomy ofthe Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Birnbaum (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, i994), quoted in David Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos ofNazJ-OccupiedEurope (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 1997).

261 Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word.

"Mensh, oyf tsu shraybn geshikhte darf men hobn a kop un nisht keyn tukhes," quoted in Yitzhak Zuckerman, "Antek," in A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. and ed. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

Quoted in Shavit, Hunger for the Printed Word.

Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

Moshe Kligsberg, "Dieyidisheyugent-bavegnung in Polyn tsvishn beyde vel-milkhumes (a sotsyologishe shtudie)," in Studies in Polish Jewry 1919-1939, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1974).

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (London: Heinemann, 1948).

Diary of Johann Paul Kremer (entry for 2 September, 1942), ed. Kazimierz Smolen, in KL Auschwitz^ seen by the SS, second edition (O'swiefim, 1978), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (London: William Collins, i986).

Martin Buber, Die Erz^hlungen der Chassidim (Frankfurt am Main: Manesse Verlag, 1949).

Victor Hugo, Inferi: La legende des siecles (Paris, 1883).

Romain Gary, La danse de Genghis Cohn (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

Nunca Mas: A Report by Argentina's National Commission on Disappeared People (London and Boston: Faber & Faber in associa­tion with Index on Censorship, 1986).

Amin Maalouf, Les croisades vues par les Arabes (Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattes, 1983).

Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Dante, Inferno, XXXIV, 129—132.

Quoted in Gilbert, The Holocaust.

the library as oblivion

Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, AeneidI-VI, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1974).

Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1930).

Flann O'Brien, "Buchhandlung," in The Best ofMyles (London: Picador, 1974).

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by and with an introduction and appendices by David Womersley (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1994); Vol. I, chapter 7.

Harald Weinrich, Lethe. Kunst undKritik des Vergessens (Munich: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997).

"Shah Muhammad, libraire," in Le Monde (Paris, 28 November, 2001). Curiously, a year after this article appeared, the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad published her account of an Afghani book­seller's life under the title The Bookseller of Kabul. Seierstad's hero is given the name Sultan Khan but many of the incidents and quota­tions are the same.

Andrew Murray, foreword to Presbyterians and the Negro: A History (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1966).

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901).

Janet Duitsman Cornelius, "When I Can Read My Title Clear": Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

Eliza Atkins Gleason, The Southern Negro and the Public Library (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, i953).

Nina Berberova, La disparition de la bibliotheque de Turgeniev (Arles: Actes Sud, i999).

Interview with Dr. Irene Kupferschmitt, Montreal, 3 May, 2004. Unpublished.

Robert Fisk, "Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze," in The Independent (London, 15 April, 2003).

Irwin, Night & Horses & the Desert.

Jabbar Yassin Hussin, Le lecteur de Bagdad (Aude: Atelier du Gue, 2000).

Johannes Pedersen, Den Arabiske Bog (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1946).

Milbry Polk and Angela M.H. Schuster (ed.), The Looting ofthe Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy ofAncient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005).

Luciano Canfora, Ilcopista come autore (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 2002).

Jean Bottero, Mesopotamie.

the library as imagination

Henry Fielding, Amelia, I:i0 (1752), Vol. VI and VII of The Complete Works ofHenry Fielding, Esq. (London: William Heinemann, i903).

Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews; vol. I, p. 5.

"The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God." Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, II.

Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," in Collected Poems 1934-1952 (London: Dent, i952).

Shakespeare, Othello, V:2.

Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England: i8i5-i865 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., i936).

Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, i95i).

In conversation with the author.

Borges, "Autobiographical Notes," in The New Yorker.

Idem., "Poema de los dones," in El hacedor.

Idem., "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain," "El acercamiento a Almostasim," "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in El jardm de senderos que se bifurcan (Buenos Aires: Sur, i94i); "El milagro secreto," in Ficciones; "El libro de arena," in Ellibro de arena (Buenos Aires: Emece, i975).

Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (1693—94), introduction by Terence Cave (New York & Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

Henri Lefebvre, Rabelais (Paris: Editeurs fran^ais reunis, 1955).

Antonine Maillet, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie (Laval: Les Presses Universite de Laval, 1971).

Lucien Febvre, Leprobleme de l'incroyance au seizjeme siecle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942).

Jean Plattard, La vie et l'oeuvre de Rabelais (Paris: Boivin, 1930).

Mijail Bajtin, La culturapopular en la edad media y en el Renacimiento: El contexto de frangois rabelais, trans. Julio Forcat and Cesar Conroy (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987).

Edwin H. Carpenter, Jr., Some Libraries We Have Not Visited: A Paper Read at the Rounce & Coffin Club, August 26, 1947 (Pasadena, CA: Ampersand Press, 1947).

Sir Thomas Browne, "Tract XIII," in Certain Miscellany Tracts (London, 1684).

Carpenter, Some Libraries We Have Not Visited.

"Qu'est-ce que tu fais, Paul?" "Je travaille. Je travaille de mon metier. Je suis attache au catalogue de la Nationale, je releve des titres." "Oh. ... Tupeux faire cela de memoire?" "De memoire? Ou. serait le merite? Je fais mieux. J'ai constate que la Nationale est pauvre en ouvrages latins et italiens du XVe siecle. . . . En attendant que la chance et l'erudition les comblent, j'inscris les titres d'oeuvres extremement interessantes, qui auraient du etre ecrits ... qu'au moins les titres sauvent le prestige du catalogue. . . ." "Mais . . . puisque les livres n'existent pas?" "Ah!" dit-il, avec un geste frivole, "je ne peux pas tout faire!" Colette, in Mes apprentissages (Paris: Ferenczi et fils, 1936).

Rudyard Kipling, "The Finest Story in the World," in Many Inventions (London: Macmillan & Co., 1893).

The Necronomicon is first mentioned in a 1922 Lovecraft story, "The Hound"; the location of a copy is detailed in "The

Festival" (1923). Both stories are collected in L.P. Lovecraft and Others, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1969).

H.P. Lovecraft, A History of the Necronomicon, (Oakman, AL: Rebel Press, 1938).

H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, "The Shadow Out of Space," in The Shuttered Room (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968).

Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers.

Shakespeare, As You Like It, II:i.

Carlo Collodi, Le avventure diPinocchio, ed. Ornella Castellani Pollidori (Pescia: Fondazione nazionale Carlo Collodi, i983).

Information provided by the director of the Provincial Archives of Oulu, Ms. Vuokko Joki.

Timothy W. Ryback, "Hitler's Forgotten Library: The Man, His Books and His Search for God," in The Atlantic Monthly (May 2003).

the library as identity

The idea was proposed by K.W. Humphreys in his splendid Panizzi lectures. See K.W. Humphreys, A National Library in Theory and in Practice (London: The British Library, 1987), which I have closely followed for this chapter.

U. Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1987).

Quoted by Humphreys in A National Library in Theory and in Practice.

Ibid.

Harris, The Reading Room.

Quoted by Humphreys in A National Library in Theory and in Practice.

Report from the Select Committee on the British Museum together with the Minutes ofEvidence, appendix and index (London: House of Commons, 14 July, 1836), quoted by Humphreys in A National Library in Theory and in Practice.

Edward Miller, Prince of Librarians: The Life and Times of Antonio Panizzi (London: The British Library Publications, 1988).

Edmund Gosse, "A First Sight of Tennyson," in Portraits and Sketches (London: William Heinemann, 1912).

Quoted by Ann Thwaite in Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1984).

Quoted by Humphreys in A National Library in Theory and in Practice.

Quoted by Harris in The Reading Room.

Judith Flanders, "The British Library's Action Plan," in The Times Literary Supplement (London, 2 September, 2005).

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L'apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958).

Maud Stephan-Hachem, La Bibliotheque Nationale du Liban, entre les aleas de l'histoire et l'acharnement de quelques-uns. (Paris: Bulletin des bibliotheques de France, ENSSIB, January 2005).

Blaine Harden, "For Immigrants, U.S. Still Starts at a Library," in The International Herald Tribune (Paris, 29 April, 1998).

the library as home

Bram Stoker, Dracula, introduction, notes and bibliography by Leonard Wolf (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1975), chapter 3.

Ibid., chapter 2.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, introduction and notes by Leonard Wolf (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1977); Vol. II, chapter 4.

Ibid., volume III, chapter 7.

Ibid., volume II, chapter 4.

Ibid., chapter 6.

These words ("Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/ To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/ From darkness to promote me?") are from Paradise Lost, Book 3, and were set as an epigraph on the title page of the first volume of Shelley's Frankenstein. Leonard

Wolf, annotator of Mary Shelley's novel, has this to say about the monster's touching, perfect words: "As an epigraph (or an epitaph) for humanity, 'Pardon this intrusion' is unsurpassed."

Shelley, Frankenstein, volume II, chapter 7.

Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca.

Plutarch, Moralia, Vol. IV, ed. and trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann Ltd, i972).

Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, introduction, translation and notes by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, i99i).

Erasmus von Rotterdam, "Adagen" (Festina lente), in Ausgewahlte Schriften, ed. W. Welzig (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, i967-i969); ii:i:i.

Steven Wilson, Related Strangers: Jewish-Christian Relations, 70 to 170 CE (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, i995).

"Alors que dans la modalite du temps, elle presentifiait l'Antiquite grecque et arabe comme modeles culturels exemplaires, dans celle de l'espace, elle s'acharnait a reunir ce qui etait disperse et a rapprocher ce qui etait eloigne." "Rendre visible l'invisible ... ce souci de possession du monde." Touati, L'armoire a sagesse.

"Defiez-vous de ces cosmopolites qui vont chercher loin dans leurs livres des devoirs qu'ils dedaignent de remplir autour d'eux. Tel philosophe aime les Tartares, pour etre dispense d'aimer ses voisins." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l'education, Book I.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations (London, i908); L29.

Hermann Broch, Der Tod des Vergil (i945).

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, edited with an introduction by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, i940); I:6.

Richard Rorty, "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature," in Raritan, volume i6, no. i (New Brunswick, NJ: i996).

Naude, Advispour dresser une bibliotheque.

conclusion

Ellibro de los veinticuatro filosofos, ed. Paolo Lucentini, trans. Cristina Serna and Jaume Portulas (Madrid: Siruela, 2000).

I thank Edgardo Cozarinsky for this information. Vladimir Nabokov/Elena Sikorskaja, Nostalgia, letter of 9 October, 1945 (Milano: Rosellina Archinto, i989).

"Lapresence de la bibliotheque est le signe que l'univers est encore tenupour pensable." Jean Roudaut, Les dents de Berenice: Essaisurla representation et l'evocation des bibliotheques (Paris: Deyrolle Editeur, i996).

The First Epistle General of John, 2:16.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (London: HarperCollins,

i995).

Northrop Frye, Notebooks.

Image Credits

Title page (Pp. ii—iii) Aby Warburg's Library, Author's collection; P. i inscription, Author's collection; P. 8, top library at Le Presbytere, Author's collection; bottom library of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, Author's collection; P. 10 stained-glass window, Author's collection; P. 11 Long Hall library, Author's collection; P. 13 boat palace, photograph provided by www.downtheroad.org The Ongoing Global Bicycle Adventure; P. 16 Montaigne's tower, photo­graph, Michael Sympson; P. 21 tower of Babel, Copyright © The British Library, Egerton, 1894; P. 23 Library of Alexandria, Mohamed Nafea / Bibliotheca Alexandrina; P. 38 Pepys's bookcase, courtesy ofhttp://www.furniturestyles.net/european/english/misc/ oak-bookcase-pepys.jpg; P. 46 literatura de cordel, Author's collection; P. 48 Yongle Dadian, © Wason Collection on East Asia, Cornell University; P. 57 scroll shelf, Author's collection; P. 58 Melvil Dewey, © 2003, from Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science by Winifred B. Linderman. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, LLC; P. 69 library steps, reprinted from Percy D. Macquoid, Dictionary ofEnglish Furniture, (Wappingers' Falls, N.Y., 2000), p. 390; P. 72 Patrice Moore's apart­ment, courtesy of http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2004/ 01/06/disposophobia.php; P. 74 Library of Congress, Jim Higgins, Library of Congress; P. 76 Domesday Book, The National Archives, ref. E31/1, E31/2; P. 80, left title page, Author's collection; right a stupa, © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; P. 87 "Writing," The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library/ University of Toronto; P. 93 library at Wolfenbuttel, Olgemalde der Rotunde, Innenansicht; P. 95 Ashurbanipal, © The Trustees of the British Museum; P. 101 Carnegie cartoon, provided courtesy HarpWeek; P. 103 bookplate, photograph, G. Blaikie; P. 108 a book burning in Warsawa, Indiana, Times-Union (Warsaw, IN); P. 111 book burning cartoon, Author's collection; P. 113 warning sign, Author's collection; P. 119 Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga, courtesy of http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/juan-zumarraga.htm; P. 130 Toronto Reference Library, Toronto Public Library (TRL); P. 132, top the King's Library, copyright © The British Library, 60.g.i2; bottom Biblioteca de Catalunya, photograph, S0ren Lauridsen, 2006; Pp. 134-35 (top) Freie Universitat, © Foster and Partners; P. 135 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, © Dominique Perrault/SODRAC (2006); P. 136, top ground plan of the library at Wolfenbuttel, Lambert Rosenbusch, Wolfenbuttel, Former Rotunda of the Library, Figure of Proportion after Serlio, Primo Libro de Geometria p i3v, Nicolini Vinetia (1551) Industrial Design 04, Thomas Helms Verlag Schwerin 2000, p7; bottom layout for library in a Carolingian monastery, Author's collection; Pp. i40-4i Boullee's ideal design for a library, Author's collection; P. i42 Salle Labrouste, photography by Diane Asseo Griliches © Library: The Drama Within (University of New Mexico Press, i996); P. i46 Reading Room, Author's collection; P. i47 Panizzi's sketch, Author's collection; P. i48 stalls, Author's collection; P. i50 Michelangelo's sketch, Author's collection; Pp. i54—55 staircase,

Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, n. 226/2006, Vesibolo (Scala di Michelangelo) /Microfoto; P. i58 ground plan of Pergamon Library, Author's collection; P. i66 Habott Library, David Sauveur /Agence VU; P. i69 Dunhuang Caves, courtesy of www.worldtravelgate.net; P. i72 Diamond Sutra, copyright © The British Library, Or 82i0/P. 2; P. i8i Kipling portrait, Library of Congress, The Carpenter Kipling Collection, (LC-USZ62-59457); P. i95 Last Jugement fresco, photograph, Thomas Hallon Hallbert; P. i98 Aby Warburg, photograph: Warburg Institute; P. 2i0 Mnemosyne panel, Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, panel 32: 'Moreska,' photograph: Warburg Institute; P. 2i6 Robinson Crusoe, Author's Collection; P. 23i Biblioburro, © Oscar Monsalve, 2005; P. 236 German prayer book, Author's collection; P. 24i Birkenau, Russian State Archives of Film and Video Documents; P. 248 Jacob Edelstein, The image of Jacob Edelstein, neg. 5i44 © The Jewish Museum in Prague; P. 249 library in Theresienstadt Ghetto, Author's collection; P. 258 Shah Muhammad Rais, photograph, Ole Berthelsen, TV 2 Nettavisen, Norway; P. 260 Booker T. Washington, Cheynes Studio, Hampton, Virginia, i903; P. 26i Cossitt Library, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries; P. 263 library in Baghdad, Joel Preston Smith, www.joelprestonsmith.com; P. 265 Code of Hammurabi, courtesy of http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/ARTH200/ politics/hammurabi.jpg; P. 273 Borges, © Eduardo Comesana; P. 275 Gargantua, C Lebrecht Music & Arts; P. 278 Rabelais's house, Author's collection; P. 28i Sir Thomas Browne, Gwen Raverat, Sir Thomas Browne, i9i0, © DACS/SODART 2006; P. 282 Dickens, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, (LC-USZ62-H7829); P. 283 Paul Masson, Author's collection; P. 286 Captain Nemo's library, Author's collection; P. 289 Hitler's bookplate, Third Reich collection, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress; P. 297 Sir

IMAGE CREDITS 359

Anthony Panizzi, Picture History, Elliott & Fry, 1870; P. 304 books of the Lebanon National Library, Author's collection; P. 309 Dracula, Author's collection; P. 313 Frankenstein, Author's collection.

Index

Page numbers in italic denote illustrations. For any specific library that is cited, see Library, [name] (e.g. Library, Bodleian)

Abd al-Rahman, 195-96 Aeschylus, i07 Akhmatova, Anna, 262 Alexandria Library Scholars Collective. See Library, of Alexandria (modern) al-Maghribi, Abul-Qasim. See Maghribi, Abul-Qasim al al-Mansur, Abi-Amir. See

Mansur, Abit-Amir al- al-Nadim, Ibn. See Ibn al-Nadim alphabetical organization, 13, 40,

47, 50-52 al-Qalqashandi. See

Qalqashandi, al- (Egyptian scholar)

al-Rahman, Abd. See Abd al-

Rahman Ammanati, Bartolomeo, 157 Amnesty International, 126—27 Anderson, Hans Christian, 39 Archaeological Museum (Baghdad), looting of, 262—64, 263 Archimedes, 28 archiving, as an act of hope, 3 Aristarchus of Samothrace, 111, 307

Aristophanes of Byzantium, 110 Aristotle, 20, 33, 194, 217, 219,

293, 317 Ashurbanipal (king), 95—96,

109—10 stele of, 95 Athenaeus of Naucratis, 27 Atwood, Margaret, 51, 243 Auden, W.H., ii4 Augustine, Saint , 43 Auschwitz concentration camp, 236

Austen, Jane, 243 Avicenna (Abou Ali El-Hossein Ibn Sina), 54

Bahktin, Mikhail, 279 Baker, Nicholson, 73—74, 79 Baldwin, James, 260—6i Balzac, Honore de, 269 Battin, Patricia, 75 Becker, May Lamberton, 39 Beckett, Samuel, 245 Beckford, William, i5 Bede, the Venerable, 225 Bell, Vanessa, ii Benedict XVI (pope). See Ratzinger, Joseph (cardi­nal)

Benjamin, Walter, i3, 42, 224, 226

Bentley, Richard, 295—96 Berberova, Nina, 26i Bergen-Belsen concentration

camp, 242 Birkenau concentration camp, 240—41, 248 survivors of, 241 Birkenhead, Sir John, 280 Biswanger, Otto & Ludwig, 207

Blake, William, ii6, i88, 248 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 6i bookcase at the Bodelian, 38 bookplate of Adolf Hitler, 289 books

affected by the order of their

reading, 196 attitudes toward, 217—20,

223—24 as authoritative, 94—95 burning of, 108, 111, 237—38 the copying of, 301—2 destruction of, 116—17 documenting the loss of, 264—66 emergency storage of, 304 as evidence of our character,

i94

imaginary, 274—77, 279—85, 290, 293—94

magic and, 183—84 on making them our own, 218—19

their potential roles in soci­eties, 217, 223, 232—33, 247 the survival of, 235, 247 the writing of, 269, 27i bookshelves, designs of, 68 Borges, Jorge Luis, 45, 6i, 88, 195, 273, 293, 307 after his blindness, 271—74 in Buenos Aires, 184—88, 220—22 Borzykowski, Tuvia, 237 Boswell, James, 256 Bottero, Jean, ii0

Boullee, Etienne-Louis, i39 sketch of ideal library by, 140 —41 Broch, Hermann, 3i7 Brodsky, Joseph, 30, ii4 Brown, Margaret Wise, 38 Browne, Sir Thomas, 7, 270,

280—8i, 281, 3i7—18 Buber, Martin, 244—45 Buddha, 270

Buddhist stupa & text, 80 Buenos Aires, ii, 42, 72, 272 Bulow, Bernhard von 236 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, i82 Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich, 6i Burckhardt, Jacob, i79 Burton, Robert, 3

Caesar, Julius, i4—15, 32, 55 Caistor, Nick, 246 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro,

243, 293

Caliph Omar I. See Omar I,

Caliph Callimachus, 50—52, 63, 77 Cam5es, Lrns de, 2i6 Canetti, Elias, 33 —34 Canfora, Luciano, 26, 264 Carlyle, Thomas, 43, 96,

299—300

Carnegie, Andrew, 96—104 his bookplate, 103 cartoon of, 101

philanthropic conditions set ^by ^i0i—2

Carnegie, Will, 97

Carroll, Lewis, 65, 70 Carson, Anne, 43 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 45, 6i,

220—22 Cassirer, Ernst, i98—99 Castro, Fidel, ii7 catalogue(s). See libraries, cata­logues and Caxton, William, 68 Cellini, Benvenuto, i52 censorship, 3i, Ю9, ii2—13, ii6 —i7 Cervantes, Miguel de, 94,

i82—83, 293 Chalamov, Varlam, ii5, 32i Chambers, Ephraim, 83 Chandler, Raymond, 44 Charles I, 295 Charpentier, Mai'a, 289 Chekhov, Anton, 44 Chesterton, G.K., 45, 293 Christ, with life-giving vine, 10 Christie, Agatha, 44 Cicero, 7i, i80 Cixi, Empress (China), i2

Boat Palace of, 13 Clemenceau, Georges, 273 Clement VII (pope), i5i—53 Clemente, Jose Edmundo, 274 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, i6—i7, 285 collections, human motives

regarding, 3—4 collections (book), random

natures of, i64—74 Collette, 282—83

computers, memory storage and, 3

Conrad, Joseph, 27, 293 Conti, Haroldo, ii4 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 279 corporations, multinational, 227 Cortazar, Julio, 29 Corvinus, King Matthias, i24 Cotton, Sir Robert, 44-45 Cozarinsky, Edgardo, i95 Cromberger, Jacobo, i20-2i Crusoe, Robinson. See Robinson

Crusoe CyberBook Plus, 78

d'Alembert, Jean le Rond, 8i-84 Dante, 243, 3i5 darkness, effects of, 269-7! data. See information; the Web da Vinci, Leonardo, i60 Decembrio, Angelo, 70 de Cusa, Nicholas, 224 Dee, John, 295

Defoe, Daniel, 43, 2i5, 2i8, 232 de Landa, Diego (Archbishop of

Yucatan), ii8, i22 Delessert, Benjamin, i43-44 de Maistre, Xavier, 5 de Nerval, Gerard, 43 Dennys, Louise, 293 de Otero, Blas, i94 de Quevedo, Francisco, 34 de Sahagun, Friar Bernardino, i22 desire, seen as knowledge, 209 d'Estaing, Valery Giscard, 94 d'Este, Leonello, 70 de Tarazi, Viscount Phillipe, 302 Devoto, Andrea, 242 Dewey, Melvil and his decimal system,

57-60, 62-63, i64 portrait of, 58 Diamond Sutra (oldest printed

book), 172 Dickens, Charles, 28i-82, 282 Diderot, Denis, 8i-86. See also

encyclopedias Dinesen, Isak, i95 Dionysus, 7 Domesday Book display of, 76 electronic, 75 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5, ii5 Douste-Blazy, Philippe, i25 Dracula, Count Vladislaus, 309,

309-ю, 3i3-14 Duguid, Paul, 228 Dunhuang, caves of, i68-74,

i69

Duran, Diego, i22-23 Durrenmatt, Friedrich, i80

Eco, Umberto, i63, 284 Eddas (Danish MS), i25-26 Edelstein, Jacob, 248, 248-50 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 26i Eisner, Will, 227 electronic media, unreliability

of, 75-80 Eliot, George, 284 Elizabeth I, 295 encyclopedias, 39, 47-50, 52,

82—89, i86 biographical, 49 page from Diderot's, 87 Yongle Dadian, 48 engrams, symbols and, 204 Erasmus, Desiderius, 180, 276,

^ 3^ 3¹7 Euclid, 28 Euripides, i07 Ewart, William, 96

Faulkner, William, 29 Febvre, Lucien, 277—79 Fielding, Henry, 269 the Fihrist (great early

catalogue), 53 Firdausi (Adbul Kasim Mansar), 258

Fitzgerald, Penelope, 324 Flaubert, Gustave, 88 Foster, Norman, 137 Frankenstein's monster,

310—14, 313 Frederick IV (King of

Denmark), i26 Freud, Sigmund, 237 Frye, Northrop, 4, 219, 324

Gaer, Joseph, 43 Gaos, Vicente, 42 Garda, German, 115 Gary, Romain, 246 Gates, William, 226 George II, 296 George, Donny, 264 Gibbon, Edward, 255

Gide, Andre, 237 Gill, Eric, 45 Ginzberg, Louis, 43 Goebbels, Joseph, 237 Goethe, 243 Golding, Arthur, 43 Gongora y Argote, Luis de, 42 Google, 78

Gordian the Younger, Emperor, 255

Gosse, Edmund, 298 Green, Henry, 62 Green, Julian, 42 Greene, Graham, 242 Gretser, Jacob, 116—17 the Grimm brothers, 39 Grivel, Guillaume, 84 Groussac, Paul, 272 Guarino, Battista, 178—79 Guicciardini, Francesco, i52

Hague Peace Conference

⁽ⁱ9^{08) 2}3⁶ Hammurabi, Code of, 265—66

stele with the, 265 Hedayat, Sadegh, 29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich, 13 Heine, Heinrich, 242 hell, various imaginings of, 245—46

Hemon, Louis, 67 Henry VIII, 295 Hering, Ewald, 20i Herodas (Greek poet), 25 Hesse, Hermann, 42

Hikmet, Nazim, 115 Hippocrates, 279 Hitler, Adolf, 288—89 Hoessler, Franz, 249—50 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 38 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 80—8i Homer, 14, 111—12, 164, 219, 230,

285, 307

Hope, A.D., ii8 Hugo, Victor, 182, 242, 245, 285 Huxley, Aldous, i07 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 284

Ibn al-Nadim, 52—53, 263 the Iliad, 230 illiteracy, 259

immortality, illusions of, 27—28 information, accumulation of, 3 injustice, 236—50

Jama'a, Ibn, his advice to

readers, i89 James I, 295 James, Henry, 163 Jefferson, Thomas, 72, 270 Jewish culture, 315—16 Jewish Prayer Book, the

author's, 235—237, 236 John, Saint (the Apostle), 270, 323 Johnson, Lionel, 68 Johnson, Samuel, 83, 91, 255—56 justice, the nature of, 244—47

Kafka, Franz, 27, 293 Kastner, Georges, 301 Keats, John, i6, 43

Keller, Helen, 237 Khalikan, Ahmad ibn

Muhammad, 49—50 Khan, Genghis, 168 King, Cyril, 72—73 King Frederick IV. See

Frederick IV (King of Denmark) King Kaiser Wilhelm II, 235 Kipling, Rudyard, 180, 283—84

in his study, 181 Kodama, Maria, i88 Korb, Hermann, 137—38 Korn, Rachel, 262 Krass, Peter, 100—101 Kremer, Johann Paul, 243

Labrouste, Henri, 144—45, 149 ladder, library, 69 Larbaud, Valery, 40 the Last Judgement fresco, 195 Laurence, Margaret, i95 Lawrence of Arabia, 307 Lebanon. See Library,

Lebanon's National Le Breton, Andre-Francois, 83 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 9^i—9²

lending books, considerations

about, 7i Leo X (pope), i5i Le Pen, Jean-Marie, i25 Lessing, Doris, 6i Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 20i Lethe (Oblivion), 253 the gifts of, 256—57

Levi, Primo, 113—14 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 43 l'Hermite, Tristan, 9, i2 librairie (the concept), i5 librarians heroic, 72—73, 322—23 rules made by, 103, 109, 113 libraries. See also archiving; books; Library, [named]; the library (author's); memory, libraries and ancient, 20—22 architectural effects upon,

131—61 catalogues and, 52—56 Chinese, 46—50 concentration camp, 240—4i as consolation, 325 "de-accession" of holdings by,

73—74 destruction of, 116—18 documenting lost, 264 electronic/virtual. See also the Web, 18, 41, 75—80, 126, 225—26, 228 as exclusionary, 18—19, 70, 73,

107—27 feelings for and in, 4—5 as foreign lands, 308 futures of, 231—32 as home, 308

imaginary. See also books,

imaginary, 284—85 as introductions to national

culture, 305 limitations upon, 31

mental and fluid, 196—97 as a mirror to the world,

323—24

organizing principles within,

4, 39—63, 197—99, 202—3 as places of memory, 30—32,

197, 201, 203 portable & transported, 230, 231

spatial challenges in, 66—76 as the sum of associations, 203 as symbols of eminence,

95—i04

Library. See also libraries; the library (author's) Abby of St. Gall

(Switzerland), 137 Aby Warburg's, ii—iii, 203—5,

208—9, 211—12 of Alexandria (ancient), 19,

20—34, 50, 55, 322 of Alexandria (modern),

22—23, 23, 77—78 Althorp, ladder in, 69 Ambrosiana (old; Milan), ¹37

Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona), 132, 137 Bibliotheque de France, 135, ¹37

Bibliotheque Nationale

(Paris), 283, 301, 142, 148 Bibliotheque Saint-

Genevieve, 144 Bodleian, 78 British Museum, 44, 73—74,

44^ ⁱ7^i,i73^-74^, 296-300 Buckingham House, i32, i37 Buddhist caves (Mogao,

China), i67-68 Bukhara, 54 Carnegie (Jackson, Mississippi), i02 Carnegie (Reading,

Pennsylvania), i02 Carolingian monastery, 136 Centre Pompidou (Paris), i" Chinese Imperial, 46 Colegio Nacional de Buenos

Aires, 8, ii, ii2 of Congress (United States of America), 22, 43-44, 72-74, 74, 79-80, 288 Cossitt (Memphis,

Tennessee), 260, 261 Doulos Evangelical traveling, 287

of Elba (2300 B.C.), i59 Father Christmas (Finland), 287

the Fatimid (Cairo), i24 Forum of Trajan (Rome), i59 Freiburg University, i37 Freie Universitat (Berlin),

i34, i37

Geneytouse, 288 the Great Corvina, i24 Habott (Mauritania),

Reading-room, 166 Harvard, 78

Herzog August Bibliothek

(Wolfenbuttel), 92, 93 Hitler's, 288 Imperial (Vienna), 254 Italian National, 295 Laurentian (Florence), i5o, ⁱ5^0-5ⁱ

Michelangelo's staircase to, i54-55 Lebanon's National, 302-4 London, 43 Lublin Yeshiva, 238 National of Baghdad, looting

of, 262-64, 263 National of Buenos Aires, 272 (Captain) Nemo's submarine, 286

New York Public (New York

City), 78 New York State, 58 Palatine Hill, excavation of, 55-56

of Pergamum, i58, i59 Petrarch's, 294-95 Poitiers, 30i

Queens Borough Public (New York City), 305 Royal of France, i38 Le Presbytere, 8 San Francisco, 72 Sholem Aleichem (Poland),

237

Sissinghurst's (the Long

Hall), ii Stanford, 78

Theresienstadt Ghetto, 248 Toronto Reference, i30, i35

Turgeniev (Paris), 26i Turin's Chemical Institute,

ii3—14 Vatican, 70

Wolfenbuttel, 136, i37 the library (author's). See also the study (author's) acquisitions for, i6—17 in childhood, 37—39 description of, i2—14, 4i at night, i2—18, i93 organization of, 4i—43, 5i,

6i—63, 65—66, i77, i93 origins of, 7—i2, i29, i3i,

i33—34

photograph of, 8 light, effects of the, 269—7i literacy, values to be seen in

encouraging, 259—60 literatura de cordel, 45, 46 Livy, 32, 7i

Llosa, Mario Vargas, i85 Lobato, Monteiro, 39 the Louvre Museum, 266 Louis XV, 85 Lovecraft, H.P., 284 Lucan, Marcus, i4—15 Lucian, 279

Macaulay, Rose, i95 Machiavelli, Niccolo, i52,

^9-90,i93 MacLeish, Archibald, i08 Maghribi, Abul-Qasim al-, 53 Magnusson, Arni, i25—26 Mahfouz, Naguib, i5

Malesherbes, Lamoignon de, 86 Mandelstam, Osip, 262 Mangan, James T., 226 Mann, Heinrich, 237 Mann, Thomas, 242, 248 Mansur, Abit-Amir al-, i24 Manutius, Aldus, 3i5 Marmol, Jose, 272 Martmez, Tomas Eloy, 44 Mary (Queen of Scots), 295 Masson, Paul, 282—84

portrait of, 283 May, Karl, 288 McCarthy, Joseph, ii7 McCarthy, Mary, 43 McLuhan, Marshall, 79 Mellarme, Stephane, 29 Melot, Michel, i33 Melville, Herman, 27 memory

books as a threat to, 2i7—18 the fundamental nature of, 203—4

libraries and, 24, 27, 30—32,

40, 53—54, i23, i88—89, i94—97,322—23

seen as desire, 209 Mencken, H.L., Ю3—4 Michaels, Anne, 293 Michelangelo, i50—60 Michelet, Jules, 285 microfilm, as unreliable, 73—74 Milton, John, 272, 3i2 Mistry, Rohinton, 245 Mnemosyne panels, Warburg's, 210

Montaigne, Michel de, 15, 317

his library tower, 16 Moore, Patrice, 7i his book-clogged apartment,

72

More, Thomas, 276, 279 Morrison, Thomas, 97—98 Musee de l'Oeuvre Notre Dame, i69

Musil, Robert, 44, 254

National Archives (Baghdad),

looting of, 262—64, 263 Naude, Gabriel, 81, 318—19

his title page on libraries, 80 Neruda, Pablo, ii5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 207 Nobel Prize Committee, 257 Nuwas, Abu, i96

O'Brien, Flann, 255 Ocampo, Silvina, 220—22 Ocampo, Victoria, 272 the Odyssey, 29, 219, 222,

307—8

Omar I, Caliph, 33, 117 oral traditions, 196—97, 315 Orwell, George, 197 Ouadane oasis, i65 Ovid, 43, 50, 195, 243

Pablos, Juan (Giovanni Paoli), i20

Pacioli, Luca, i60 Panizzi, Sir Antonio, 145, 147,

297, 297—300, 305

papyrus, export restrictions on, 22

parchment, the invention of, 22 parody, 279—80

the Patriot Act (United States of

America), i25 Paul, Saint (the Apostle), 233 Pepys, Samuel, 37, 57 Peron, General Juan, 94—95, 272 Petrarch, Francesco, 4, 16, 253,

3i7

his life, 294 Philip of Macedon, 264 Photius, 265

Pinochet, General Augusto, 115 Pinto, Fernao Mendes, 216 Plato, 51, 129, 159, 194, 279, 317 Pliny the Elder, 27i Pliny the Younger, 39 Plutarch, 32, 314 Pollio, Asinius, 55 Polo, Marco, i69 Polyxena (the victim), 244—45 Potter, Beatrix, 39 Pound, Ezra, 42 power, the drive for, 100 Prescott, William, 118, 121 progress, the illusion of, 232—33 Project Gutenberg, 228 Propertius, Sextus, 50 Proust, Marcel, 237 Ptolemaic kings, 20—22, 24, 27, 31 Pushkin, Alexander, 262 Qalqashandi, al- (Egyptian

scholar) 264 Queen of Sheba, 253 quoting, functions of, 224

Rabelais, Francois, 275-80, 285

his home, 278 Rais, Shah Muhammad, 258,

258-59

Raphael (the painter), i52 Ratzinger, Joseph (cardinal), ii6 Raverat, Gwen, illustration by,

28i

reading. See also books; libraries; Library aloud, 6i, i79, i96, 230, 272 the craft of, 232-33 "the cursory mode of,"

255-56

the powers gained from, 9i prevention of. See illiteracy silent, 56

tasks associated with, 277 the teaching of. See literacy revenge, the impulse toward,

244

Rimbaud, Arthur, 43 Robinson Crusoe, librarian &

missionary, 2i5-17 Rockwood, Roy, 39 Rorty, Richard, 3i8 Rosenberg, Alfred, 238 Rosensaft, Yossl, 249 Rothenberg, Jeff, 76 Roudaut, Jean, 323 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 207, 3i6 Ruhnken, David, ii2 Rulfo, Juan, i97 Rushdie, Salman, i5

Ryback, Timothy W., 288

Saint John. See John, Saint (the

Apostle) Saint Paul. See Paul, Saint (the

Apostle) Saint-Priest, Etienne Dumont, 288

Salgari, Emilio, 39 Sallust, 7i Sand, George, 285 Saxl, Fritz, i98, 202, 205, 207-8 Sayers, Dorothy L., 293 Schama, Simon, 43 Schipper, Yitzhak, 24i-42 Schmidt, Arno, i82 scrolls, library storage of illus­trated, 57 Semon, Richard, 203-4 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, i3i,

i88, 279 on books & wisdom, 3i4-i6 Shakespeare, William, 243, 293 Shaw, T.E. See Lawrence of Arabia

Shearer, Rhonda Roland, 77-78 Sheba. See Queen of Sheba Shelley, Mary. See

Frankenstein's monster Shotoku, Empress (Japan), 8i Siculus, Diodorus, 26, 264-65 Siddhartha, Prince. See also

Buddha, i69 Sikorskaja, Elena, 322-23 Sloane, Sir Hans, 296 Smith, Logan Pearsall, 6i

Sn0hetta (architectural studio), 22

Socrates, 282

despiser of books, 217—18 Solomon, King, 253 Song Taizong, Emperor, 49 Sophocles, 107, 127 Spencer, Earl of, 68 Stein, Aurelius Marcus, 171—74 Steiner, George, 307 Stendhal, 43

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 4,

11—12,164,194 Stoker, Bram. See Dracula,

Count Vladislaus Stoppard, Tom, i27 Strabo (Greek geographer), 20, 26

the study (author's) contents of, i78 significance of, 178—90 stupa. See Buddhist stupa Suleiman I, Sultan, 124 symbols the importance of, 203—4, 206, 208—9

organized by Aby Warburg,

210

Tacitus, i23 Tao, Shi, 126 Tayfur, Abu Tahir, 5i technology, 4, 28 Theopompus, 264—65 Thomas, Dylan, 270 Thumb, General Tom, 282 times past, the endurance of,

317—18 Timon of Phlius, 29 Tolstoy, Leo, 115, 242 the Tower of Babel, 19—20,

²3^—2^ 33^, 7⁸ building of, 21 Traherne, Thomas, 316—17 Twain, Mark, i02

Updike, John, i02 Urquhart, Thomas, 280

Varro, Marcus Terence, 55 Vasari, Giorgio, 157—59 Veronese, Guarino, 178 Vieira, Antonio, 2i6 Vigil, Constancio C., 38 Virgil (Publius Vergillius Maro),

27, 71, 159, 178, 253 Volney, C.-F., 3ii Voltaire, i5

von Bulow, Bernhard. See Bulow, Bernhard von

Walsh, Jill Paton, 293 Wang Yuanlu, i7i Warburg, Aby. See also Library, Aby Warburg's, 193, 198—211 seen reading, 198 Warburg, Max, 200 Washington, Booker T., 259, 260 the Web. See also Google, 28, 322 critiqued, 224—28 uses and limitations of, 227—28

Weil, Simone, 31—32 Weinrich, Harald, 257 Wells, H. G., 238 Welty, Eudora, 102, 104 Whitman, Walt, 97 William III, 295 Winchester, Sarah, 86 Woolf, Virginia, 17—18, 180 words, as calling forth light,

270—71 workshop. See the study World Wide Web. See the Web writers, their wants and needs,

i78—90

Xenophon, 285

Yahoo! (Internet Company), 126 Yongle Dadian. See encyclopedias

Zola, Emile, 94, 237, 245 Zweig, Stefan, 237 Zumarraga, Juan de, 118—22, 119