Packing My Library

 Packing My Library: An Elegy & Ten Digressions (2018) by Alberto Manguel

When Alberto Manguel finds himself leaving France and a large number the books in his library behind, he begins to muse on the nature of libraries, what it means to collect books and what our collections say about us, what reading is and what words mean (or don't mean...), and a myriad of other topics related to books and the love of reading. One thought leads to another and he mingles what he calls digressions among his short essays on the written word. But his "digressions" most definitely connect with the essays which precede and follow and I don't really see them as digressions. 

This is a beautifully written tribute to books and a love of reading--something I can certainly relate to and agree with. I haven't collected 35,000 books (!) and I can't imagine going through even the 5,500 books I own and having to pare that collection down to move to a smaller space. I definitely can't see how one could go from 35,000 books to a tiny amount to fit in a tiny apartment in New York City. But I can see how needing to do so would prompt the kind of musings that Manguel gives us in Packing My Library. I love to lift good quotations from the books read. If I were to really list favorite quotes from Manguel's book, I would need to pretty much quote the whole thing--but I have selected a few to share below. My one disappointment (totally on me) was that from the blurb on the book flap I had expected there to be more about collecting and the contents of his library (before the great purge). There's one essay about collecting and bits and pieces about the books that used to be in his collection--but not as much as anticipated. ★★★★

First line: My last library was in France, housed in an old stone presbytery in the Loire Valley, in a quiet village of fewer than ten houses.

Of course, literature may not be able to save anyone from injustice or from temptations of greed or the miseries of power. but something about it must be perilously effective if every dictator, every totalitarian government, every threatened official tries to do away with it by burning books, by banning books, by censoring books, by taxing books, by paying mere lip-service to the cause of literacy by insinuating that reading is an elitist activity. (p. 133)

The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain, akin to falling in love, if you will forgive the maudlin comparison. It is acquired by oneself alone, like a sort of epiphany, or perhaps by contagion, confronted by other readers. I don't know of many more ways. The happiness procured by reading, like any happiness cannot be enforced. (p. 139)

Last line: "In my end is my beginning," Mary Queen of Scots is said to have embroidered on her cloth while in prison. This seems to me a fitting motto for my library,