The Library at Night
by Alberto Manguel
2006, Knopf, 373p

I saw the VR Presentation based on the book before I read the book itself.

I started this book with a huge sense of enthusiasm as the three page foreword made me laugh out loud several times. Manguel loves libraries (particularly his own), and has thought long and hard about their relationship to the world. And then writes about those ideas with elegant prose.

About a third of the way in, I told a friend who's also a librarian (as I am) that this should be required reading in library school. Perhaps it is: it was published a decade after I left library school.

I have some philosophical disagreements with Manguel: he argues that ALL knowledge and publications should be preserved ... and yet humans are meant to forget. We would collapse under the weight of our memories. I think our civilization (and its stored knowledge) is similar. Although he acknowledges that a true Library of the world must itself expand to encompass the world ...

When arguing against the microfilming and discarding of newspapers (citing one particular library, but it's been done many places) he says: "Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words." I'm not disagreeing with this notion in general, but you have to look at the specific case: he's talking about newsprint, newspapers. It's printed on the cheapest paper the publisher can find, and by the time it's 50 years old, very few librarians will let you handle the original because there's a significant likelihood it will crumble in your hands. If they do let you handle it, it will be in a special room, possibly with a chaperone, while wearing gloves (to prevent the oil from your skin further damaging the paper). Both the colour and the texture of the paper will have changed significantly since its publication. So much for his "reading experience." Libraries microfilm newsprint to preserve it as it decays, and also to save space because they're underfunded and can't afford more space. (I acknowledge that microfilm turned out to not have a very good shelf life ...) Manguel offers no answers, just complaints: if you're going to go after an underfunded institution, I think you should at least offer some possible solutions.

Possibly my favourite quote: "Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good."

The second half of the book became something of a struggle to get through. Manguel is long-winded, and, while his writing is good, I think he could have said the same thing in 200 pages instead of 370 and it would have been better for it.