Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

ENDPAPER PAGES
n Hemingway’s celebrated story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the protagonist, who is dying, recalls all
the stories he will now never write. “He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had
never written one. Why?” He mentions a few but the list, of course, must be endless. The shelves of books
we haven’t written, like those of books we haven’t read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal
library’s farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.
Among the books I haven’t written — among the books I haven’t read but would like to read — is The
History of Reading. I can see it, just there, at the exact point where the light of this section of the library
ends and the darkness of the next section begins. I know exactly what it looks like. I can picture its cover
and imagine the feel of its rich cream pages. I can guess, with prurient accuracy, the sensual dark cloth
binding beneath the jacket, and the embossed golden letters. I know its sober title page, and its witty
epigraph and moving dedication. I know it possesses a copious and curious index which will give me
intense delight, with headings such as (I fall by chance on the letter T) Tantalus for readers, Tarzan’s
library, Tearing pages, Toes (reading with), Tolstoy’s canon, Tombstones, Torment by recitation, Tortoise
(see Shells and animal skins), Touching books, Touchstone and censorship, Transmigration of readers’
souls (see Lending books). I know the book has, like veins in marble, signatures of illustrations that I have
never seen before: a seventh-century mural depicting the Library of Alexandria as seen by a
contemporary artist; a photograph of the poet Sylvia Plath reading out loud in a garden, in the rain; a
sketch of Pascal’s room at Port-Royal, showing the books he kept on his desk; a photograph of the sea-
sodden books saved by one of the passengers on the Titanic, without which she would not abandon ship;
Greta Garbo’s Christmas list for 1933, drawn up in her own hand, showing that among the books she was
going to buy was Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; Emily Dickinson in bed, a frilly bonnet tied snugly
under her chin and six or seven books lying around her, whose titles I can just barely make out.
I have the book open in front of me, on my table. It is amicably written (I have an exact sense of its tone),
accessible and yet erudite, informative and yet reflective. The author, whose face I’ve seen in the
handsome frontispiece, is smiling agreeably (I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman; the clean-shaven face
could be either, and so could the initials of the name) and I feel I’m in good hands. I know that as I
proceed through the chapters I will be introduced to that ancient family of readers, some famous, many
obscure, to which I belong. I will learn of their manners, and the changes in those manners, and the
transformation they underwent as they carried with them, like the magi of old, the power of transforming
dead signs into living memory. I will read of their triumphs and persecutions and almost secret
discoveries. And in the end I will better understand who I, the reader, am.
That a book does not exist (or does not yet exist) is not a reason to ignore it any more than we would
ignore a book on an imaginary subject. There are volumes written on the unicorn, on Atlantis, on gender
equality, on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and the equally dark Youth. But the history this book records
has been particularly difficult to grasp; it is made, so to speak, of its digressions. One subject calls to
another, an anecdote brings a seemingly unrelated story to mind, and the author proceeds as if unaware
of logical causality or historical continuity, as if defining the reader’s freedom in the very writing about
the craft.
And yet, in this apparent randomness, there is a method: this book I see before me is the history not only
of reading but also of common readers, the individuals who, through the ages, chose certain books over
others, accepted in a few cases the verdict of their elders, but at other times rescued forgotten titles from
the past, or put upon their library shelves the elect among their contemporaries. This is the story of their
small triumphs and their secret sufferings, and of the manner in which these things came to pass. How it
all happened is minutely chronicled in this book, in the daily life of a few ordinary people discovered here
and there in family memoirs, village histories, accounts of life in distant places long ago. But it is always
individuals who are spoken of, never vast nationalities or generations whose choices belong not to the
history of reading but to that of statistics. Rilke once asked, “Is it possible that the whole history of the
world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we’ve always spoken about its
masses, as if we were telling about a gathering of people, instead of talking about the one person they
were standing around, because he was a stranger and was dying? Yes, it’s possible.” This
misunderstanding the author of The History of Reading has surely recognized.
Here then, in Chapter Fourteen, is Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and treasurer and chancellor to

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King Edward II, who was born on January 24, 1287, in a little village near Bury St. Edmund’s, in Suffolk,
and who, on his fifty-eighth birthday, completed a book, explaining that “because it principally treats of
the love of books, we have chosen after the fashion of the ancient Romans fondly to name it by a Greek
word, Philobiblon”. Four months later, he died. De Bury had collected books with a passion; he had, it was
said, more books than all the other bishops of England put together, and so many lay piled around his bed
that it was hardly possible to move in his room without treading on them. De Bury, thank the stars, was
not a scholar, and just read what he liked. He thought the Hermes Trismegistus (a Neoplatonic volume of
Egyptian alchemy from around the third century AD) an excellent scientific book “from before the Flood”,
attributed the wrong works to Aristotle and quoted some terrible verses as if they were by Ovid. It didn’t
matter. “In books,” he wrote, “I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in
books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and
decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would
be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.” (Our author doesn’t
mention it, but Virginia Woolf, in a paper read at school, echoed de Bury’s contention: “I have sometimes
dreamt,” she wrote, “that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and
statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon
imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He
sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give
them. They have loved reading.’ ”)
Chapter Eight is devoted to an almost forgotten reader whom Saint Augustine, in one of his letters,
praises as a formidable scribe and to whom he dedicated one of his books. Her name was Melania the
Younger (to distinguish her from her grandmother, Melania the Elder) and she lived in Rome, in Egypt
and in North Africa. She was born around 385 and died in Bethlehem in 439. She was passionately fond of
books, and copied out for herself as many as she could find, thereby collecting an important library. The
scholar Gerontius, writing in the fifth century, described her as “naturally gifted” and so fond of reading
that “she would go through the Lives of the Fathers as if she were eating dessert”. “She read books that
were bought, as well as books she chanced upon with such diligence that no word or thought remained
unknown to her. So overwhelming was her love of learning, that when she read in Latin, it seemed to
everyone that she did not know Greek and, on the other hand, when she read in Greek, it was thought
that she did not know Latin.” Brilliant and transient, Melania the Younger drifts through The History of