Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Collected Poems (London, 1975).
ORDAINERS OF THE UNIVERSE
1. Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, ed. & trans. John Yardley (London, 1984), 4.8.1–6.
2. Menander, Sententiae 657, in Works, ed. W.G. Arnott (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1969).
3. M.I. Rostovtzeff, A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century B.C. (Madison, 1922), quoted in William
V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
4. P.Col.Zen. 3.4, plus P.Cair.Zen. 4.59687, in Harris, ibid.
5. I take a certain pride in the fact that, until our time, the only city in the world to have been founded
with a library was Buenos Aires. In 1580, after a first unsuccessful attempt to found on the banks of the
Rio de la Plata, a second city was erected. The books of the Adelantado Pedro de Mendoza became the

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new city’s first library, and those in the crew who were literate (including Saint Teresa’s younger brother,
Rodrigo de Ahumada) were able to read Erasmus and Virgil under the southern cross. See Enrique de
Gandia’s Introduction to Ruy Diaz de Guzmán’s La Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1990).
6. Plutarch, “Life of Alexander”, in The Parallel Lives, ed. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970).
7. Ibid.
8. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, Vol. I, quoted in Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo,
1987).
9. Canfora, ibid.
10. Anthony Hobson, Great Libraries (London, 1970). Hobson notes that in 1968 the annual intake of the
British Museum Library was 128,706 volumes.
11. Howard A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library: Glory of the Hellenic World (New York, 1967).
12. Ausonius, Opuscules, 113, quoted in Guglielmo Cavallo, “Libro e pubblico alla fine del mondo antico”,
in Libri, editori e pubblico nel mondo antico (Rome & Bari, 1992).
13. James W. Thompson, Ancient Libraries (Hamden, Conn., 1940).
14. P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972).
15. David Diringer, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, 2 vols. (London, 1968).
16. Christian Jacob, “La Leçon d’Alexandrie”, in Autrement, No. 121, Paris, Apr. 1993.
17. Prosper Alfaric, L’Évolution intellectuelle de Saint Augustin (Tours, 1918).
18. Sidonius, Epistolae, II: 9.4, quoted in Cavallo, “Libro e pubblico alla fine del mondo antico”.
19. Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (London, 1902–24).
20. Alain Besson, Medieval Classification and Cataloguing: Classification Practices and Cataloguing
Methods in France from the 12th to 15th Centuries (Biggleswade, Beds., 1980).
21. Ibid.
22. Almost fifteen centuries later, the American librarian Melvil Dewey augmented the number of
categories by three, dividing all knowledge into ten groups and assigning to each group a hundred
numbers whereby any given book might be classified.
23. Titus Burckhardt, Die maurische Kultur in Spanien (Munich, 1970).
24. Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton, 1984). Pedersen notes that
al-Ma’mun was not the first to establish a library of translations; the son of an Umayyad caliph, Khalid ibn
Yazid ibn Mu’awiya, is said to have preceded him.
25. Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic
Education (Princeton, 1992).
26. Burckhardt, Die maurische Kultur in Spanien.
27. Hobson, Great Libraries.
28. Colette, Mes apprentissages (Paris, 1936).
29. Jorge Luis Borges, “La Biblioteca de Babel”, in Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1944).
READING THE FUTURE
1. Michel Lemoine, “L’Oeuvre encyclopédique de Vincent de Beauvais”, in Maurice de Gandillac et al., La