In Dear Fahrenheit 451: A Librarian’s Love Letters and Break-Up Notes to Her Books , Annie Spence identifies herself as a “bookshelf flower”. In between notes written to books she’s recommended at a public library, presumably during her decade as a librarian in the American Midwest, there is one addressed to a rather fancy, over stylised personal library she stumbles upon at a party. Eventually, she can’t control herself and rearranges some books, and is eventually asked by the host to leave.
In contrast, most of us bookshelf flowers have far more self-control, and are usually content to stare at and politely browse through endless shelves, whether at a bookshop, a public library, an acquaintance’s home and even our own more modest collections. It’s a pastime — a compulsion even — that keeps giving, allowing us to judge others, to be nudged down reading memory lane, to pick up tips on what to read or reread next, to sail along on the ongoing and never-ending process of profiling our own ever-changing reading selves.
Packing away books
This is why the task, as anyone who’s moved home or hostel knows too well, can get rather emotionally overwhelming when we have to pack away even a few books. And in the company of Alberto Manguel, the Argentinian-born translator, editor and historian of reading, as he recounts packing away his personal collection of 35,000 books in a slim volume, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions , we are forced to re-examine not just our own engagement with books and reading, but also the passage of time.
In his more encyclopaedic A History of Reading more than 20 years ago, Manguel had confessed to a certain possessiveness of books read. As a teenager working in a Buenos Aires store, while going about his daily job of dusting books, he couldn’t control himself, and: “A few times I stole a tempting book.” Jamaica Kincaid, he noted, had said of her childhood in Antigua when she’d spirit away books from the library: “Once I had read a book I could not bear to be parted with it.” Similarly with Manguel: “I too soon discovered that one doesn’t simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognisable by the roughness and smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover.”
Manguel, we now happily find, in time beat that impulse to walk off with another’s book. He’d better have, given that he’s now the Director of the National Library of Argentina, and an advocate of returning public libraries to their core mission: “to guide readers to their books”. He writes in Packing My Library : “I realise how petty, how egotistical it seems, this longing to won the books I borrow. I believe that theft is reprehensible, and yet countless times I’ve had to dredge up all the moral stamina I could find not to pocket a desired volume.” But learning from his own worst instincts, he does not lend his own books.
Through his meditation of his itinerant life (Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Paris, London, Milan, Tahiti, Calgary, a village south of the Loire Valley in France where he lived for 15 years till 2015 and from where he was packing off the said 35,000 volumes), he conveys the unsettling sense of part-recognition and part-bewilderment upon seeing a different edition of a much-loved book.
“My boxed-up books have conjured doppelgängers in the places in which I now live,” he writes. “On Broadway [in New York City], between 72nd and 74th Streets sidewalks display piles of books on trestle tables. I stop every time I go by and glance through the paperback spines and the mostly tattered hardbacks. Often I come across titles I recognise, sometimes in the same edition I collected in my library or had in my distant adolescence (but no longer have), ghostly reminders of another place and another time. I pick up a book, I leaf through it, I read a line there and there. Is this really the same book I held in my hands faraway and long ago?… Each reading experience is unique to its place and time, and cannot be duplicated. In spite of my hopes, I know that no library can be fully resurrected.”
Reading the same text again
And can a library ever be said to be complete, he asks. A part quote from Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno points the reader to the original. “The day must come — if the world lasts long enough — when every possible tune will have been composed — every possible pun perpetrated — and worse than that, every possible book written! For the number of words is finite.” And so: “Instead of saying ‘what book shall I write?’ an author will ask himself ‘which book shall I write?’”
But as Manguel suggests, even if such an absurd future were to come to pass, it may not matter to us readers — each reading of even the same text will necessarily be unique.
