The Library at Night is an ode to libraries worldwide - both old and new - and the author's personal library in a small village in Loire, France. The author finds great comfort in sitting in his own library at night and simply surfing through his books; "to assemble in one place our vicarious experience of the world." The book is also an ode to various books and its readers who grant books immortality - "Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth."
The book describes the library as myth, order, space, power, shadow, shape, chance, workshop, mind, island, survival, oblivion, imagination, identity and home. Some of the libraries described are Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, Le Presbytere, Bodleian Library, Centre Pompidou Library in Paris, Laurentian Library in Florence, etc. Some imaginary libraries are also mentioned such as the library of Captain Nemo, Mr. Casaubon's scholarly library in George Eliot's Middlemarch, murderous, monastic library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, etc.
The author notes, "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." While comparing paper books with electronic books, Manguel says "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." He describes the joy of a library thus "to be able to enter a place where books are seemingly numberless and available for the asking is a joy in itself."
Manguel also mentions how certain books were banned at certain points of time for various reasons - under the military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s, poems of Neruda and Nazim Hikmet (communists) and novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Russians) were considered suspicious. In March 2003, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger argued that the Harry Potter books "deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly." Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, declared that the public burning of books by authors such as Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Freud, Zola, Proust, Gide, Helen Keller and H. G. Wells allowed "the soul of the German people again to express itself."
I loved reading about the history of libraries, which is, in essence, a history of the world till date. I also loved reading about the comparison between paper books and electronic books and how the two will continue to co-exist.
My only grudge - the book makes absolutely no mention of any library in India nor any Indian author. It's a little sad considering India has the most number of libraries [https://www.quora.com/Which-country-in-the-world-has-the-most-libraries-total-and-which-has-the-most-libraries-per-capita] and possibly the largest number of languages in which books are written in a single country. Truly, history that is never recorded is never narrated.
Some quotes that stayed with me:
The illusion of immortality is created by technology.
Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
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.
The act of reading is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
The Web is an instrument. It is not to blame for our superficial concern with the world in which we live.
We alone, and not our technologies, are responsible for our losses, and we alone are to blame when we deliberately choose oblivion over recollection. The petroglyphs of our common past are fading not because of the arrival of a new technology but because we are no longer moved to read them.
The stories that ultimately reach us are but the reports of the survivors.
There is something about sitting outside in the dark that seems conducive to unfettered conversations.
Alice's bewilderment or Sinbad's curiosity reflect again and again my own emotions.
Electronic text that requires no page can amicably accompany the page that requires no electricity.
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