Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel



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Manguel, Alberto - A History of Reading (1998, Knopf Canada,

STEALING BOOKS
am once again about to move house. Around me, in the secret dust from unsuspected corners now
revealed by the shifting of furniture, stand unsteady columns of books, like the wind-carved rocks of a
desert landscape. As I build pile after pile of familiar volumes (I recognize some by their colour, others by
their shape, many by a detail on the jackets whose titles I try to read upside down or at an odd angle) I
wonder, as I have wondered every other time, why I keep so many books that I know I will not read again.
I tell myself that, every time I get rid of a book, I find a few days later that this is precisely the book I’m
looking for. I tell myself that there are no books (or very, very few) in which I have found nothing at all to
interest me. I tell myself that I’ve brought them into my house for a reason in the first place, and that this
reason may hold good again in the future. I invoke excuses of thoroughness, of scarcity, of faint
scholarship. But I know that the main reason I hold onto this ever-increasing hoard is a sort of voluptuous
greed. I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves, full of more or less familiar names. I delight in
knowing that I’m surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life, with intimations of my future. I like
discovering, in almost forgotten volumes, traces of the reader I once was — scribbles, bus tickets, scraps
of paper with mysterious names and numbers, the occasional date and place on the book’s flyleaf which
take me back to a certain café, a distant hotel room, a faraway summer so long ago. I could, if I had to,
abandon these books of mine and begin again, somewhere else; I have done so before, several times, out
of necessity. But then I have also had to acknowledge a grave, irreparable loss. I know that something
dies when I give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
And now, with the years, my memory can recall less and less, and seems to me like a looted library: many
of the rooms have been closed, and in the ones still open for consultation there are huge gaps on the
shelves. I pull out one of the remaining books and see that several of its pages have been torn out by
vandals. The more decrepit my memory becomes, the more I wish to protect this repository of what I’ve
read, this collection of textures and voices and scents. Possessing these books has become all-important
to me, because I’ve become jealous of the past.
The French Revolution attempted to abolish the notion that the past was the property of a single class. It
succeeded in at least one aspect: from an aristocratic entertainment, the collecting of ancient things
became a bourgeois hobby, first under Napoleon, with his love for the trappings of Ancient Rome, and
later in the republic. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the displaying of fusty bric-à-brac, of old
masters’ paintings, of early books, had become a fashionable European pastime. Curiosity shops
flourished. Antique dealers amassed caches of pre-revolutionary treasures which were bought and then
displayed in the home museums of the nouveaux riches. “The collector,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “dreams
that he is not only in a distant or past world but also, at the same time, in a better one in which, although
men are as unprovided with what they need as in the everyday world, things are free of the drudgery of
being useful.”
In 1792 the Louvre Palace was turned into a museum for the people. Voicing a haughty complaint against
the notion of a common past, the novelist Viscount François-René de Chateaubriand protested that works
of art thus assembled “had no longer anything to say either to the imagination or to the heart”. When, a
few years later, the artist and antiquarian Alexandre Lenoir founded the Museum of French Monuments
to preserve the statuary and masonry of the mansions and monasteries, palaces and churches that the
revolution had plundered, Chateaubriand dismissively described it as “a collection of ruins and tombs
from every century, assembled without rhyme or reason in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins.” In both
the official world and the private world of collectors of the past’s ruins, Chateaubriand’s criticism went
staunchly unheard.
Books were among the most copious remains left behind by the revolution. The private libraries of
eighteenth-century France were family treasures, preserved and expanded from generation to generation
among the nobility, and the books they contained were as much symbols of social standing as finery and
deportment. One imagines the Count d’Hoym, one of the most celebrated bibliophiles of his time (he died
at the age of forty in 1736), drawing from one of his overpopulated shelves a volume of Cicero’s Orations,
which he would regard not as one among many hundreds or thousands of identical printed copies
dispersed through numerous libraries but as a unique object, bound according to his specifications,
annotated by his hand and bearing his family arms embossed in gold.


From roughly the end of the twelfth century, books became recognized as items of trade, and in Europe
the commercial value of books was sufficiently established for money-lenders to accept them as collateral;
notes recording such pledges are found in numerous medieval books, especially those belonging to
students. By the fifteenth century the trade had become sufficiently important for books to be placed on
the schedule of goods sold at the trade fairs of Frankfurt and Nördlingen.
Some books, of course, were unique because of their rarity, and were valued at exorbitant prices (the rare

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