Books by Alberto Manguel
“I really would recommend the book. It’s not a textbook, it’s not a history, although it does cover a lot of history. It’s a series of meditations, really, on libraries. He’s somebody who, in his private library, when it was in their home in France, would get up in the middle of the night and just wander in and pull books from the shelves and read them because he couldn’t sleep. It’s a series of encounters with books, both books as artifacts, and as time travel. It’s a meditation on libraries, both institutional and private, and what it means to collect books, whether you’re Aby Warburg, or Hans Sloane—whose collection was the foundation of the British Museum Library (now the British Library)—or one of the librarians in Tabriz or Baghdad before it was destroyed by the Mongols. It’s a book which you can dip into, you don’t need to read it from cover to cover. It’s got an index. It’s a book which gives enormous pleasure but also insight into the motivations for collecting books, organizing them into bodies of knowledge, and all that those tasks entail. Ultimately, it’s about the pleasure of doing that, the pleasure of owning books, the pleasure of collecting them, of organizing them.” Read more...
Richard Ovenden, Librarian
A History of Reading
by Alberto Manguel
This is the book with which general readers who are curious about the history of reading should start. It offers a sweeping overview
Interviews where books by Alberto Manguel were recommended
The best books on The History of Reading, recommended by Leah Price
We can learn about the past not just through what was written but how it was read. Historian of books Leah Price tells us about reading aloud in Roman times, Gutenberg-era marginalia, and Middle Age solutions to information overload
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1
The Care of Books: An Essay on the Development of Libraries and Their Fittings, From the Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
by John Willis Clark -
2
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg -
3
The Library Book
by Susan Orlean -
4
The Library: A World History
by James Campbell & Will Pryce (photographer) -
5
The Library at Night
by Alberto Manguel
The best books on Libraries, recommended by Richard Ovenden
The best books on Libraries, recommended by Richard Ovenden
Knowledge is power and nowhere has it been better preserved down the millennia than in libraries. Here Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books and the librarian in charge of Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries, talks us through books that shed light on what libraries are and what they do, and why they remain absolutely vital in our digital age.