Alberto Manguel

A Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor.

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Reviewed by Peter Ackroyd, The Times May 8, 2008

There is an old superstition that books, alone in the night and the silence,
whisper one to another; the library then becomes an echo chamber of words
and syllables, conjuring up the great general drama of the human spirit.
Libraries are legendary places. Libraries enter myth as well as history. Lost
libraries, like that of Alexandria, are a reminder of the transience of human
achievement and of human learning. “No place,” Samuel Jonson said,
“affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a
public library.”

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