Book Reviews: Surprises in the Stacks
Cynthia D. Bertelsen - Roanoke Times & World News
May 21, 2008
Libraries are the new cool spots, if the number of books being published is any measure of this astonishing phenomenon.
Don Borchert's "Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library" and Kathleen Low's "Casanova Was a Librarian: A Light-Hearted Look at the Profession" came out in 2007. This year, two new kids on the block join them: Alberto Manguel's "The Library at Night" and Scott Douglas' "Quiet, Please: Dispatches from the Public Library."
Book lovers recognizing Manguel's name will rejoice at a new tome from the author of the best-selling "A History of Reading" (1996). The literary riches found in "The Library at Night" almost defy description. Interweaving the personal with the historical, Manguel draws the reader in immediately: "The library in which I have at long last collected my books [30,000!] began life as a barn sometime in the fifteenth century, perched on a small hill south of the Loire." Sigh.
Laced throughout with black-and-white photos, Manguel's ode to libraries captures the multifarious nature of ancient and modern repositories of human knowledge and achievement.
Each library "is the mirror of the universe" in its own way. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of libraries ("The Library as Space," "The Library as Mind," The Library as Survival") and guides the reader through humankind's history, sprinkling nuggets of information on a path toward understanding and awareness. Each page presents enough information for whole books.
Thus, strange as it sounds, Manguel's book is for all practical purposes a portable library. Each sentence, or nearly so, points the reader to new knowledge or to old knowledge long forgotten. In one two-page section, Manguel references "The Domesday Book," compiled in 1086; a burnt papyrus from lava-infused Pompeii; the short life of most CDs; the ancient Egyptian poet and librarian Callimachus, who worked at the legendary Library of Alexandria; and the bare shelves and virtual library housed together in the new Library of Alexandria. Libraries, in Manguel's musings, contain the knowable world.
The idealism, no, the sacredness of libraries permeates Manguel's epic. His book requires a permanent place on the shelves of book lovers everywhere.
In contrast, Scott Douglas, a twentysomething public librarian from Anaheim, Calif., narrates the sometimes sordid reality of day- to-day life in libraries in his often hilarious and irreverent "Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Library." He blows apart Manguel's ivory tower image of libraries. Telling how he found his career, Douglas begins by describing the lowest of the low in the library echelon in a chapter titled "Being the Chapter in Which Our Hero Discovers He Wants to be a Librarian."
The rest of this quirky book follows him as he gets his library degree (which he considers to be, frankly, meaningless) and starts work in a public library in a downscale California neighborhood.
Like Manguel, Douglas delves into the history of libraries, but only briefly. He focuses instead on the many absurdities of daily library practices.
No one and nothing escapes his caustic pen. (Or keyboard.) Crazy patrons and wacko librarians share space with cranky senior citizens and stubborn kids intent on using the library's computers and MySpace.com no matter what.
Douglas tosses in wry remarks and wisecracks on nearly every page, including nutty footnotes, too. In text boxes that he calls "commercial breaks," he dredges up seemingly irrelevant information and plops it all down like Web pop-up windows.
Pithy wisdom and side-splitting tales of life on the front lines - - the reference desk -- make this a great read for anyone who has ever used a library. And that means most of us.
Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Library, By Scott Douglas.
Da Capo Press. 330 pages. $25
The Library at Night, By Alberto Manguel.
Yale University Press. 373 pages. $27.50
----
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion
Copyright 2008 by Roanoke Times & World News
