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August 9, 2008
The library at night
From a correspondent
I thought you'd be interested in the following quote in case you'd like to put it on the blog.
This is a paragraph from The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel - a wonderful book, a lyrical meditation really, about the meaning of libraries through history - published by Yale in 2006. This particular section is about the pleasures of browsing in a library, and discovering books through serendipity, which is a key part of the library experience that those advocates of the mantra of ''libraries-are-for-finding-out-stuff' fail to grasp:
'We pick our way down endless library shelves, choosing this or that volume for no discernible reason: because of a cover, a title, a name, because of something someone said or didn't say, because of a hunch, a whim, a mistake, because we think we may find in this book a particular
tale or character or detail, because we believe it was written for us, because we believe it was written for everyone except us and we want to find out why we have been excluded, because we want to learn, or laugh, or lose ourselves in oblivion.'
The book is full of wisdom such as this. If there was one book that our councillors and officers and ministers in charge of libraries should read, it's this one. But then, as we know, they don't read books....Best regards
Posted by Perkins at August 9, 2008 6:11 PM
Comments
I remember regularly working late and alone in the library of the Ashmolean and then walking out through the darkened museum galleries - a wonderfully atmospheric experience.
Posted by: Julian at August 9, 2008 7:59 PM