ouvrage particulièrement éclairant sur la bibliothèque et son imaginaire.

Only recommended for library geeks.

hm, I guess I missed the boat on this one. The topic is clearly fascinating and the author has lots of interesting tidbits collected, but to me, perhaps ironically, this book really lacked curation and focus.

There were some great quotes and snippets of library history in this book, but eventually I realized that Manguel approaches libraries in a very old-fashioned way - very heavy on preservation and print books and silent reading rooms full of arcane collections like the Warburg Institute Library. I appreciate that kind of thing but it's SO far from my professional experience that I got a little tired of it.

And that whole Important History of Civilization business is more exclusive than he lets on - he laments the loss of potentially great work by ancient poets and doesn't seem to realize that even if we had every single word written by those people we wouldn't have a complete picture of human history.

"During the day, the concentration and system tempt me, at night I can read with a lightheartedness verging on insouciance."

I love it that I discovered Manguel as the collector and translator of a bunch of "fantastic literature." I love it that he helped make The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. I love it that books and stories are magical in some way for him, too. I am only just beginning this book, but the chapters are all The Library as... Myth, Space, Shadow, Power, Chance, Oblivion, Identity, Home (to name a few).

Super-excited!

A companion to his History of Reading volume, this is a meandering tale of the importance of the library as space. He does mention some libraries open to at least some of the public, but mostly it's about private, personal libraries, the history of literacy, the importance of proper shelving and window placement (but not in an architectural sort of way), and most importantly, how being in a library changes a person (and how that person changes a library). Contemplative, astute, stunningly global in breadth. Thank you, Alberto Manguel.

The writing is at turns interesting and pompous, leaning mostly to the pompous. The book also has some factual errors about the Google book scanning project, which weakens the critique, but only if you know the details. Mostly, this ended up being an annoying effort to show off the breadth of reading by this writer.