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...

The best books on Libraries

Richard Ovenden, Librarian