room exp exp h

                      ABY WARBURG;     THE STONE;    
                         THE PANMURE POET

...........a complicated (and variable) system. Those who

knew him spoke of the “instinct” that guided him in

compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject

interested him at the time, an instinct that led him

to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the

shelves following the lines of thought he was at any

given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a

library was above all an accumulation of associations,

each association breeding a new image or text to be asso-

ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the

first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

            Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading

room (which he called die kulturwissenschaft1iche Bibliothek

Warrburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to

the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of

the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was

an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue

and features to archaic experiences, less individual than

generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol-

ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the-

theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who

had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.

According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin-

guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting

living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an

engram) that can be animated when we remember. For

Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive

at the core of every culture, and what interested him

was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example,

or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain

of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that

they would shape the voice and style of its literature

and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won-

derfully described this active memory as “a ghost story

for adults.”

                                              

                                                                 THE LIBRARY

                                                                    AS MIND

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                        …to give visible form to the psychic presence and to the movements

of the soul,

Aby Warburg, Auswgewählte Schriften

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night.

While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy

reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from

the reading lamps split my library shelves in two.

Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness;

below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles.

This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a

glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is

superseded by another order, which owes its existence

merely to what I can remember. My library has no cata-

logue; having placed the books on the shelves myself,

I generally know their position by recalling the library’s

layout, and areas of light or darkness make little differ-

ence to my exploring. The remembered order follows a

pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library,

rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the

pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects

the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The

deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of

subject matters, the intimate history of each book’s sur-

vival, the traces of certain times and certain places

between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen

observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered

copy of the poems of Bias de Otero, the number of vol-

umes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section

devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section

devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much

Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every 

library is autobiographical.

            In the Cathedral of Sainte Cecile of Albi, in the South

of France, a late-fifteenth-century fresco depicts a scene

from the Last Judgment. Under an unfurled scroll, the

recalled souls march towards their fate, each naked

solemnly carrying on the breast an open book. In this

troop of resurrected readers, the Book of Life has

divided and reissued as a series of individual volumes,

open, as the Apocalypse has it, so that the dead may be

“judged out of those things which were written in the

books.” The idea persists even today: our books will

bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we

are and who we have been, our books hold the share of

pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the

we call ours we will be judged.

            What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not

merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh

of associations implied in the choice. Our experience

builds on experience, our memory on other memories.

Our books build on other books that change or enrich

them, that grant them a chronology apart from that of lit-

erary dictionaries. I’m now, after all this time, incapable

of tracing all these connections myself. I forget, or don’t

even know, in what way many of these books relate to

one another. If I advance in one direction-Margaret

Laurence's African stories conjure up in my memory

Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, which in turn makes me

think of her Seven Gothic Tales, which leads me back to

Edgardo Cozarinsky (who introduced me to Dinesen’s

work)and his book on Borges and film, and further back

to the novels of Rose Macaulay, which Cozarinsky and

I discussed one afternoon long ago in Buenos Aires, both

of us surprised that someone else knew about them—

then I miss the other strands of this complicated web, and

wonder how, like a spider, I was able to string the seem-

ingly immeasurable distance, for example, from Ovid’s

Tristia to the poems of ‘Abd al-Rahman, exiled to North

Africa from his home in Spain. It is not only a matter of

fortuitous connections. Books are transformed by the

sequence in which they are read. Don Quixote read after

Kim and Don Quixote read after Huckleberry Finn are two

different books, both coloured by the reader’s experience

of journeys, friendship and adventures. Each of these

kaleidoscope volumes never cease to change; each new

reading lends it yet another twist, a different pattern.

Perhaps every library is ultimately inconceivable,

because, like the mind, it reflects upon itself, multiplying

geometrically with each new reflection. And yet, from a

library of solid books we expect a rigour that we forgive

in the library of the mind.

            Such fluid mental libraries are not (or were not)

uncommon; in Islam they are exemplary. Even though

the Koran was written down very early, most ancient

Arab literature was for a long time entrusted to the recol-

lection of its readers. For instance, after the death in 815

of the great poet Abu Nuwas, no copy of his work was

found; the poet had learned by heart all his poems, and in

order to set them down on paper the scribes had to resort

to the memory of those who had listened to the master.

Precision of recall was deemed all-important, and

throughout the Islamic Middle Ages, it was considered

more valuable to learn by listening to books read out

loud than by private study, because the text then entered

the body through the mind and not merely through the

eyes. Authors published not so much by transcribing

their work themselves as by dictating it to their assis-

tants, and students learned by hearing those texts read

out to them or by reading them to a teacher. Because of

the Islamic belief that only oral transmission was truly

legitimate, memory (not its physical representation

in the solid world of books and manuscripts, though

these were important enough to be treasured in schools

and mosques) was deemed to be the great repository of

a library. Up to a point, “library” and “memory” were

synonymous.

            And yet, however careful our reading, remembered

texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment,

shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental

library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines,

while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo

occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A

couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay

“Shooting an Elephant” expand in my memory to sev-

eral pages of description and reflection that I think

I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of

the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all

I can remember is the title.

            Neither the solid library on my shelves nor the shift-

ing one of memory holds absolute power for long. Over

time, the labyrinths of my two libraries mysteriously

intermingle. And often, through what psychologists call

the perseverance of memory (the mental phenomenon

by which a certain idea is perceived as true even after it

has proven false), the library of the mind ends by over-

riding the library of paper and ink.

Is it possible to set up a library that imitates this whimsi-

cal, associative order, one that might seem to an unin-

ormed observer a random distribution of books, but that

in fact follows a logical if deeply personal organization?

I can think of at least one example.

 One day in 1920, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, recently appointed

to the chair of philosophy at Hamburg’s New University and working at

the time on the first volume of his ground breaking Philosophy

of Symbolic Forms, asked to visit the famous Warburg Library,established

thirty years earlier by Aby Warburg. Following Warburg’s conception of

the universe, books on philosophy were set next to those

on astrology, magic and folklore, and art compendiums rubbed covers

with works of literature and religion, while manuals on

language were placed next to volumes of theology.

poetry and art. Cassirer was taken through the uniquely

organized collection by the assistant director, Fritz Saxl,

and at the end of the tour he turned to his host and

said, “I’ll never come back here. If I returned to this

labyrinth, I’d end up by losing my way.”

            Years later, Cassirer explained his panic: “[ Warburg’s]

library isn’t simply a collection of books but a catalogue

of problems. And it isn’t the thematic fields of the library

that provoked in me this overwhelming impression, but

rather the library’s very organizing principle, a principle

far more important than the mere extension of the sub-

jects covered. Here, indeed, the history of art, the his-

tory of religion and myth, the history of linguistics and

culture were not only placed side by side but linked one

to the other, and all of them linked in turn to a single

ideal centre.”211 After Warburg’s death in 1929, Cassirer

compared the shelves of the library’s reading room, built

to follow the elliptical shape of the walls, to “the breath

of a magician.” For Cassirer, Warburg’s books, arranged

according to the intricacies of his thought, were, like the

books of Prospero, the stronghold of his life’s force.

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg on 13 June i866, the

eldest son of a Jewish banker. Photographs show him as

a short, shy-looking man with powerful dark eyes. In a

questionnaire he once imagined for his own amusement,

he described himself as “a small gentleman with a black

moustache who sometimes tells stories in dialect.”

Unable to reconcile himself to his father’s demands to

embrace both Jewish orthodoxy and the family banking

business, he suffered from long bouts of anxiety and

melancholia. To find relief, he sought experience of the

world in books, and became deeply interested in the

early philosophies of Greek and Rome, in the cultures of

the Renaissance, in Native American civilizations and in

Buddhist religion. He seemed unable to accept the con-

straints of any one discipline or school of thought. An

eclectic curiosity dominated all his undertakings.

            His passion for books and images began in his child-

hood. Among the earliest intellectual experiences he

could remember was seeing, at the age of six, the striking

illustrations of Balzac’s Petites misères de la vie conjugale,

depicting melodramatic family scenes in which weeping

women, angry men, screaming children and amused ser-

vants acted out the misfortunes of bourgeois married

life. The boy became obsessed by them, and they vividly

haunted his dreams. A couple of years later, he started

devouring books “full of stories about Red Indians.”

These images and adventures offered him, he was later

to recall, “a means of withdrawing from a depressing

reality in which I was quite helpless.” Unable to voice his

anger and frustration, what Warburg called the emotion

of pain, he sought and found “an outlet in fantasies o

romantic cruelty. This was my inoculation against active

cruelty.” His siblings remembered him always sur-

rounded by books, reading every scrap of paper he came

across—even the family encyclopedia, which he perused

from the first to the last volume.

            Not only reading but collecting books became

Warburg a vital need. On his thirteenth birthday, deter-

mined to follow neither his father’s career nor his

family’s religion, the voracious adolescent made his

younger brother Max the offer of his birthright:

would exchange his privilege, as the eldest son, of enter-

ing the family firm, for the promise that Max would buy

him all the books he ever wanted. Max, aged twelve

agreed. From then on, the many books purchased with

funds supplied by the faithful Max became the core of

Warburg’s library.

            Warburg’s collecting passion was never entirely hap-

hazard. On the contrary; from very early on, his reading

seems to have been directed towards certain very specific

questions. Most of us, looking back, find it astonishing to

recognize in our first books inklings of an interest that

did not become apparent until much later, which never-

theless apparently stirred us long before we could put

our interest into words. The emotions of Warburg's

childhood books finally found an explanation in Gotthold

Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon, a classic text that he read for

the first time when he entered Bonn University at the age

twenty. Lessing’s Laocoon became for him a magical

touchstone. “One must be young,” the aged Goethe had

written almost sixty years earlier, “to understand the

influence that Lessing’s Laocoon had on us, tearing us

away from the passivity of contemplation and opening up

free realms of thought. The ut pictura poesis [the classical

comparison between the aesthetics of painting and those

poetry], so long misunderstood, was all of a sudden

brushed away; their summits seemed very different to us,

and yet they seemed very close in their foundations.” In

Lessing’s work the young Warburg recognized not only

power of an argument that attempted to explore the

different creative systems of images and words, but above

all the notion that each age recaptures for its own reasons

an aspect of tradition upon which it builds its own sym-

bology and meaning, what he was to call “the survival of

antiquity, a problem of a purely historical nature.” The

question that began to take shape for Warburg was how

our oldest symbols are renewed at different ages, and

how their reincarnations link and reverberate in each

other. One of the most resonant words in his intellectual

development was Kompatibilität, compatibility —

experience by association — so it’s not surprising that he

chose to explain his own library with a definition bor-

rowed from the critic Ewald Hering. For Warburg his

library was memory, but “memory as organized matter.”

The library that Warburg began to assemble in his

adolescence, which in 1909 he transferred to his new

house on the Heilwigstrasse in Hamburg, was above all a

personal one, and it followed a uniquely idiosyncratic

cataloguing system. During the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, a controversy raged in Germany

about the best method of organizing a library. The oppos-

ing parties argued, on the one hand, for a hierarchic

order of subjects to guide the reader from one field

knowledge to another, and on the other, for an order

based on the size of a volume and its date of acquisition.

(The latter, incidentally, was a system that had been

employed successfully in certain medieval libraries.) For

Warburg, neither method was satisfactory. He demanded

from his collection a fluidity and vivacity that neither

enclosure by subject nor restrictions of chronology

allowed him. Fritz Saxl noted in 1943 how Warburg had

reacted to the idea of such mechanical cataloguing, which,

in an age of increased book production, was rapidly

replacing the “much more scholarly familiarity which is

gained by browsing.” According to Saxl, “Warburg rec-

ognized the danger” and spoke of the “law of the good

neighbour.” The book with which one was familiar was

not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the

unknown neighbour on the shelf that contained the vital

information, even though one might not guess this from

its title. “The overriding idea was that all the books

together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of

information and being supplemented by its neighbours-

should by their titles guide the student to perceive the

essential forces of the human mind and its history. Books

were for Warburg more than instruments of research.

Assembled and grouped, they exercised the thought of

mankind in its constant and in its changing aspects.

                       

Not only books. Warburg had a remarkable memory

for images, and was able to weave complicated tapestries

of iconographical connections which he then attempted

to expand upon in fragmentary essays. While poring

through antiquarian catalogues, he would jot down on

small cards the titles that caught his attention, accompa-

nied by dense commentaries in what he called his “thick

eel-gruel style,” filing them in separate boxes accord-

ing to a complicated (and variable) system. Those who

knew him spoke of the “instinct” that guided him in

compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject

interested him at the time, an instinct that led him

to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the

shelves following the lines of thought he was at any

given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a

library was above all an accumulation of associations,

each association breeding a new image or text to be asso-

ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the

first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

            Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading

room (which he called die kulturwissenschaft1iche Bibliothek

Warrburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to

the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of

the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was

an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue

and features to archaic experiences, less individual than

generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol-

ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the-

theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who

had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.

According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin-

guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting

living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an

engram) that can be animated when we remember. For

Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive

at the core of every culture, and what interested him

was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example,

or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain

of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that

they would shape the voice and style of its literature

and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won-

derfully described this active memory as “a ghost story

for adults.”

            And the library itself? What was it like to stand in the

midst of what Cassirer had compared to Prospero’s

stronghold? Most libraries give an impression of system-

atic order, of an organization made manifest by themes

or numbers or alphabetical sequences. Warburg’s library

shows no such system. When I visited the reconstructed

reading room in Hamburg (which today holds only a

small part of his volumes) and inspected the rounded

shelves in the oval central chamber, the feeling I had was

bewilderment; it was like standing in the middle of a for-

eign city whose signposts doubtlessly meant something

but whose sense I couldn’t fathom. The shelves suggested

to the eye an uninterrupted association of titles, not a lin-

ear order with a beginning and an end. Intellectually it

was possible for me to find reasons for the proximity of

any two titles, but those reasons could be so varied or

could seem so far-fetched that I could not relate them to

any traditional sequence—such as M following L, or

2999 preceding 3000. Warburg’s system was closer to that

of poetic composition. Reading the verse “Bright is the

ring of words” on a page offers an immediate and com-

plete comprehension of the poet’s vision. The reader

requires no explanation; the line conveys a full and

instantaneous revelation about the act of reading,

through the words and the elicited music. But if the poet

were explicitly to lay before us all the connecting byways

and meanderings springing from his ineffable intuition as

to the nature of poetry—if he tried to make all the leads

and connections visible to us—such comprehension

would elude us. So it is with Warburg’s library.

But Warburg would not allow these connections to

remain invisible, nor would he consider them except as

constantly changing, so he constructed his library as a

place uninterrupted by sharp angles, in which they could

retain endless mobility. In a sense, his library was an

attempt to disclose, in all their rawness, the bare nerves

of his thought, and to allow room for his ideas to migrate

and mutate and mate. If most libraries of his time resem-

bled an entomologist’s display case of pinned and

labelled specimens, Warburg’s revealed itself to the visi-

or as a child’s glass-fronted ant farm.

In the spring of 1914, bending to his colleagues’ pressure,

Warburg decided to open his library to scholars and

scholarly research, instituting as well a system of grants

that would enable students to come to Hamburg and

work. Fourteen years earlier he had warily mentioned the

idea to his brother Max; now he returned to the vast proj-

ect, and discussed its possibilities with Fritz Saxl. He did

so with great reluctance because, he admitted, he loathed

losing possession of the private intellectual realm he had

so laboriously created. And yet he realized that this open-

ing up of the library was the necessary next step in

his attempt to chart the intricate symbolic heritage

humankind, “the afterlife of the ancient world.”

            But the First World War put a temporary end to the

plans. In the midst of the bleakness and confusion of

time, Warburg, who had suffered intermittently from

anxiety and depression since his childhood, began to

intuit a bleak concordance between his mental state and

the state of the world. “Like a seismograph, his sensitive

nerves had already recorded the underground tremors to

which others remained utterly deaf,” wrote one of

contemporaries. Warburg now saw his search for con-

nections between our earliest symbolic representations of

irrational impulses and fears, and later artistic manifest-

tions of those symbols, as a tension reflected in his own

mental struggles. He had wanted to believe that science

would eventually, by chronicling the metamorphoses of

our phobic reflexes, find rationally apprehensible expla-

nations for our primordial emotional experience.

Instead, he realized, science had constructed as the latest

avatar an even more advanced machinery of war, with its

mustard gas and deadly trenches.

            In one of his fragments (to which he had appended the

exorcism “You live and do me no harm” he wrote the

following: “We are in the age of Faust, in which the mod-

ern scientist endeavours—between magic practice and

mathematics—to conquer the realm of reflective reason

through an increased awareness of the distance between

the self and the external world.” The end of the war in

1918 brought him little relief. Two years later the distance

seemed, in his eyes, to have vanished almost completely.

            In 1920, facing the prospect of opening his library

to a scholarly public, and unable to sustain the mental

anguish any more, Warburg entered the famous clinic

of the Swiss doctors Otto and Ludwig Binswanger in

Kreuzlingen, where Friedrich Nietzsche had been treated

thirty years earlier.He remained there until 1924.

“Why,” he asked then, “does fate consign a creative

human being to the realm of eternal unrest, leaving it up

to him to choose where his intellectual upbringing will

take place: whether in hell, purgatory or paradise?"

            His time at the clinic was one of slow recovery and

attempts at reassembly, as he tried to put together his

scattered mind, fragmented as it was into thousands of

images and piecemeal notes. “God is in the details,” he

Iiked repeating. And yet he felt—like Rousseau, who

had said, “I die in details”-that he could no longer

gather the many strands of image and thought he had

once pursued. But under Dr. Binswanger’s care he

began to feel whole again, and in 1923 he asked whether

the authorities would release him if he could prove his

mental stability. He suggested speaking to the clinic’s

patients, and on April 23 he delivered a lecture on native

serpent rituals he had witnessed in North America as a

young man. In a journal note he made at the time, he

remarked that he saw himself as Perseus, slayer of the

serpent-headed Medusa, who avoided staring directly

into the poisonous monster’s eyes by looking at her

reflection in his shield. He also noted that, in the Middle

Ages, Perseus had been debased from hero to mere

fortune-teller, to be rescued only later, during the

Renaissance, as a symbol of heroic humanity.

            When Warburg left the clinic in 1924, he discovered

that Saxl, in agreement with Warburg’s family, had finally

transformed the library into the projected research centre.

The change, however much he had foreseen it, troubled

him greatly and made him feel diminished; “Warburg

redux,” he signed one of his letters at the time. And yet

the transformation also seemed to fill him with “an

almost awe-inspiring energy,” and he set himself to work

once again, under these new conditions, amidst his

beloved books.

            It would be obvious to any visitor walking into

Warburg’s library that, from its very conception, his cre-

ation was essentially a visual one. The shape of the

shelves, the associated titles they housed, the pictures

and photographs that littered the rooms, all spoke of his

concern with the physical representation of ideas and

symbols. The sources of his questions were images;

books allowed him to reflect on these images, and pro-

vided words to bridge the silence between them.

Memory, that key word in Warburg’s vocabulary, meant

above all the memory of images.

            Warburg’s unfinished and unfinishable project was

the great iconographic sequence he called Mnemosyne,

a vast collection of images that charted, across a tapestry

of connections, the many trails the scholar had been

following. But how to display these images? How to

place them in front of him so that they could be studied

in sequence, but a sequence that could be varied accord-

ing to new ideas and newly perceived connections? The

solution to this problem came from Saxl. Upon Warburg’s

return to Hamburg, Saxl met him with large wooden

panels, like standing blackboards, across which he had

stretched black hessian. Warburg’s images could be fixed

with pins on the cloth, and easily removed whenever

he wanted to alter their position. These giant displays,

"pages” of an endless book of variable sequence, became

the core of all Warburg’s activities in the last years of his

life. Since he could change both the panels and

images on them at will, they became the physical

illustration of his realm of thought and his library,

to which he appended streams of notes and comments.

"These images and words are intended as help for those

who come after me in their attempt to achieve clarity,”

he wrote, “and thus to overcome the tragic tension

veen instinctive magic and discursive logic. They

the confessions of an (incurable) schizoid, deposited

in the archives of mental healers.”  In fact, Saxl’s

panels-a book of giant shifting pages-restored  to

Warburg, up to a point, his lost private space; they were

private domain that helped him recover some of his

mental health.

            Warburg died in 1929, at the age of sixty-three.

Three years after his death, a couple of volumes of his

collected works appeared in Germany; they were the last

to be published in his homeland for a long time.

Fragmented and wonderfully far-ranging, his writings

are yet another version of his library, another represen-

tation of the intricacies of his thought, another map of

his extraordinary mind. He wanted his intuition to con-

clude in scientific laws; he would have liked to believe

that the thrill and terror of art and literature were steps

towards understanding cause and function. And yet,

again and again, he returned to the notion of memory

as desire, and desire itself as knowledge. In one of his

fragments he writes “that the work of art is something

hostile moving towards the beholder.” With his library

he attempted to create a space in which that hostility

would not be tamed (something he realized could not be

done without destruction) but lovingly reflected back,

with curiosity, respect and awe, a mirror of his curious,

intelligent mind.

            In 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as

Chancellor of the Reich, the Warburg library and staff

emigrated to England. Six hundred boxes of books plus

furniture and equipment were shipped across the sea to

London. I like to imagine the many barges crossing the

water, laden with the volumes assembled over the years,

a fragmented portrait of their owner—a reader now

dead, but present in this dismantled representation of his

library about to be reshaped in a foreign land. The books

were first accommodated in an office building in

Millbank; three years later, the University of London

agreed to house the collection but not rebuild the oval

shelves On 28 November 1944, the Warburg Institute

was finally incorporated in the university, where it still

functions today. Fifty-one years later, a copy of

Warburg’s house was built in Hamburg on the site of his

old home on the Heilwigstrasse, and an attempt was

made, based on original photographs, to reproduce the

shelving and the display of part of his collection, so that

anyone who visits the house and stands for a moment in

the reading room can feel as if Warburg’s mind is still at

work among his memorable and changing shelves.

(Alberto Manguel in "The Library at Night")