A catalogue of camels
Eric Christiansen
A HISTORY OF READING by Alberto Manguel HarperCollins, £25, pp. 372
Adilettante, said Sir Lewis Namier, is one who is more interested in himself than in his work. Probably a quotation, but it says something about Namier, if not much about dilettantes; and yet these sour words may well drift into the mind of the reader of Senor Manguel, who tends to bring himself into the story more often than the subject demands. Apart from his father's book-room in Buenos Aires, where all vol- umes were bound in green leather and trimmed to fit the height of the shelves regardless of the size of the printed page, not much of the autobiography sticks in the memory.
For the rest, he can be ponderously play- ful. He ends with a chapter describing what the book might have been, if it had been longer, almost to the point of infinity. All very much a la mode, but why not save the space and cut the price to the public? Unfortunately, he fell, at an impressionable age, under the influence of his illustrious fellow-countryman, Borges; became his reader, in fact, since Borges was blind, and under the ambiguous tuition of this affable sage discovered the superiority of books to life at a time when most lads arrive at a different conclusion. He became a book- lover; possibly what he calls a 'book-fool', or bookworm; even, he claims, a book- thief, although not for profit. His chapter on Count Libri, the vile predator of manuscripts and early printed books rescued from the yahoos of the French Revolution, concludes that
his underlying longing, the urge to be the only one able to call a book 'mine', is common to more honest men and women than we may be willing to acknowledge -
which tells us nothing about thieves, Libri, or honesty, but suggests a prevalent moral haze.
For Manguel is an essayist of a now superannuated stripe, the remote descendant of Charles Lamb, who wrote: 'I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He collects anecdotes, takes notes in favourite notebooks, hunts odd facts, stares at bindings and margins and at all the apparatus by which authors fondly imagine they are directing their readers to the sub- ject in hand. The history of reading, by con- trast, is an earnest, pedantic subject, which has become a pathological section of liter- ary criticism, and a solemn bore in cultural history, where they calculate the death of God by the sales-charts of Tom Paine. The possibilities of writing a stodgy history of reading are endless. The mismatch between that subject and this author is blatant. Nevertheless, he has done an excellent job, and there will be few of his readers who will not carry away something new and fascinating from this work.
Viz: the mediaeval Jewish child began learning to read by licking honey smeared on the slate displaying the Hebrew alphabet. The Peronist mob used to chant 'Shoes, yes, books, no' at Argentinian intellectuals. Brecht thought Kafka was 'the only true Bolshevist writer'. One Luigi Serafini has written a whole encyclopaedia of inexplicable but detailed diagrams accompanied by a text in an indecipherable alphabet. Monte Cristo cigars are so named by request of the Cuban cigar- rollers who enjoyed this novel most of those read aloud to them by hired readers to relieve the monotony of their job. In the 1830s Tom Fleck would read Josephus' Jewish Wars to the burgesses of Peebles as the latest news. A cockfighting chair is in fact a library chair with a book-rest at the back, for the sitter to use facing backwards. The Egyptian finance minister was using 434 rolls of papyrus a month in the third century BC. The famous library of Alexan- dria was probably a corridor attached to the museum, and the man who wrote the Greek verses translated by Cory as 'They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead' was an assistant librarian there and the first to arrange the books in order, from alpha to omega': But it was a 10th- century Persian vizier who travelled with 117,000 volumes carried by a line of 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order. And it was Golding who said: 'One day someone will find an unsigned William Golding novel, and it will be worth a for- tune.'
Let those who knew all these things not conclude that there are no more unexpect- ed novelties in Manguel. Let those who suspect that many of these things are inaccurately recorded give him the benefit of the doubt; he has faithfully transmitted the errors of his sources, on the ornamen- tal principle, and never forgets that what he describes is one of the most intense sources of pleasure, as well as pain. As such, it invites persecution and censorship, not merely by governments with authoritar- ian tendencies, but by such benevolent moral guardians as A. Comstock of New York, who operated within the US legal system, and could boast, early in this centu- ry, that
in the 41 years I have been here, I have con- victed persons enough to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches, 60 coaches containing 60 passengers each and the 61st almost full. I have destroyed 160 tom of obscene litera- ture.
He had also managed to drive 15 pub- lishers to suicide. His aim was to protect the young from moral contamination by restricting their reading-matter; an aim shared by almost every parent. Rather than waste their time and money in resorting to Comstock's 'savage and superficial' methods (which would be ineffective against television), they would do well to leave reading alone, and concentrate on the suppression of pizza. It will do no harm, and comes to much the same in the end.
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