In tenth-century Persia the Great Visir al-Sahib ibn Abbad al-Qasim “transported his collection of 17,000 volumes by means of a caravan of four hundred camels trained to ride in alphabetical order, so they would never be separated,” as Alberto Manguel tells us in A History of Reading.
From the library in Alexandria to the present day, human beings have never ceased to imagine, build, populate, destroy, save, burn, refurbish, rebuild, and even defend their libraries tooth and nail. Animals who collect, hoarding addicts, another name for homo sapiens sapiens could have been homo librarium, because ordering according to alphabet, genre, or passion is already part of our DNA—those terabytes of micro-filmed information; that miniature, biological, portable library everyone carries in their veins and flesh—because the need to order our memories is genetic.
Literature, architecture, painting, film, comics, and television have all recognized this human need, whose rush is matched only by desire, to accumulate and classify books. Because it belongs to the constellation of what excites and terrifies that we have created from images, stories, and myths; imagination transformed into matter, where the librarians of ancient Alexandria coexist with the timeless librarians of Borges’s Library of Babel; readers delve into anarchic Sherlock Holmes alongside methodical Bouvard and Pécuchet; minimalist libraries like David Copperfield’s paternal inheritance, kept on the top floor of his house; and the inter-stellar kind we find in Isaac Asimov’s novels, or in sci-fi films.
Young Copperfield read as if his life depended on it, feeding—with Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, or Tom Jones—the hope that a better life existed, identifying with the heroes and anti-heroes in his reading and wanting to be like them. Reading as desire and escape is ever present from the late Middle Ages. We know, from at least Paolo and Francesca onwards, that reading about love produces monsters. Modern readers, like Madame Bovary or La Regenta, suffer precisely because the books they consume don’t provide models that help them to be happy; that is, to come to terms with reality. Long before those two women’s imaginary grandfather, Alonso Quijano, was transformed into his own Mr Hyde, Don Quijote de la Mancha. His library was to blame. Apparently the Necronomicon, a horrendous book that drives you crazy or kills you if you read it, exists in Lovecraft’s fictional University of Miskatonic; the book’s possible existence reminding us that nightmares are made of the same stuff as dreams.
The Bible isn’t a single book, it is a collection of papyrus and scrolls, of the canonical books of Judaism and Christianity, a hallowed library we now read in a single volume—an anthology of novels, poems, and stories. The same is true of other manifestations of the idea of the Book, like Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (comprising twenty-eight volumes in the eighteenth century) or Wikipedia (which, if printed, would comprise 8,000 700-page volumes), expressions of The Book of Sand, which nobody has read from cover to cover, that only exists in our consciousness as a selection, as myriad fragments. And that is exactly what reading is all about: storing pieces of a puzzle we can never complete in our memory and sub-conscious.
As readers we each amass our own library. We find solace and comfort in the knowledge that, beyond their walls, public, municipal, university, and national libraries are home to hundreds of thousands of books, a vast storehouse of printed knowledge. Beyond the walls of our skull, however, our own culture finds material form on the shelves in our study and house, to which we have been adding volumes throughout our lifetime, whether we have read them or not, that we will read one day or never open—who knows and who cares? What is really important is that we own and arrange them, know they are there, within reach, that we can touch, browse, or read them, partially or entirely, when we feel like it; have recourse to them, like Captain Nemo in his library on the Nautilus, or secretly at night, like the monks Umberto Eco imagines in their early medieval monastery, a labyrinth besieged by crime and censorship.
For millennia, every home possessed a small model of the Temple: a chapel, an altar, a corner consecrated to the spirits, the deceased, or the gods. Modernity has gradually erased them from domestic architecture, as the empire of the book and the proliferation of paperbacks simultaneously filled houses, turned bookcases into furniture as standard as tables and chairs, the surfaces of our daily bread. The library filled the divine, domestic space. The Encyclopedia Britannica replaced the Bible.
We all have our private, personal library, one that is also partly imagined. This essay is about the sum total of our libraries. About those fictional libraries that have been so read or scrutinized, so admired, feared, and enjoyed that they no longer belong to Count Dracula or the librarians of the Beast or Babel or Dr Who, or even to Bram Stoker, Walt Disney, Jorge Luis Borges, or Sydney Newman, but are now humanity’s heritage, a collective imagination, the dream and property of each and every one of us, exemplars of homo librarium.
In other words, although libraries are fictional, they are real; although they were created by other people, they belong to us, because we are their readers.
Don Quijote de la Mancha’s library has no walls, shelves, bound volumes, or ceiling beyond a skull whose few wispy grey hairs are covered by a rather ridiculous helmet that he nevertheless wears with panache, conviction, and dignity—all the dignity Rocinante’s ungainly gait will allow. Don Quijote de la Mancha’s portable library is his head, which is sometimes mad, often sensible, and always appealing. When he speaks, he does so as if reading aloud from one of the many chivalric novels he has devoured, reread, and memorized, until his excessive reading of such novels and his lack of sleep drives him crazy, when he is but a skinny yeoman by the name of Alonso Quijano, el Bueno, and his books aren’t yet constellations of neurons, bio-chemical miniatures inside his brain.
On the other hand, Alonso Quijano’s library does have walls and shelves and just over a hundred volumes, the large ones handsomely bound, though Cervantes says nothing about the appearance of his small books. Paradoxically, we enter it not via the reader-hero, but through his censors: the people worried about his madness. While his housekeeper and niece—armed with holy water that could in fact be gasoline—opine that all books, without exception, are harmful and must be thrown onto the same bonfire, the graduate and barber decide to carry out an inspection, and view each suspicious item one by one. They eye them, leaf through them, comment on them, so we readers are lucky enough to witness an unexpected scene of literary criticism.
The first book they check is Amadís de Gaula: one reckons it deserves to be put to the flame because it was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain and is consequently the root of all evil; the other counters that it is the best of the genre and must therefore be spared. But the next volumes they review aren’t equally lucky: several sequels are flung out of the window for being bad, presumptuous, and nonsensical. After so many are condemned, a second tome is finally saved, at which point morality and aesthetics start playing their strange game of tennis. Regrettably, the two inquisitors’ peculiar morality wins out, their unhealthy distaste for popular, escapist literature, which they disguise with social and literary arguments. Fortunately, there are books of poems as well as chivalry. As a result, La Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes surfaces, the latter being a friend of the graduate and a man “better versed in misfortune than in verse.” We then realize that the priest and the barber are keen readers and as fanatical about prose and verse as Alonso Quijano himself. Fans of the literary world, they were fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to have lost their senses in books.
Or their fortunes. In Breaking the Frame: Don Quixote’s Entertaining Books, Edwin Baker shows how unlikely it is that someone of Alonso Quijano’s socio-economic status could have owned a library fit for a millionaire; one valued—in the currency of the time—at 4,000 reales, and also how unlikely it is that a cultured reader in the seventeenth century would have thought to bring those individual books together in that particular way. He compares the hero’s library with the innkeeper’s and that of Diego Miranda, the Knight in the Green Coat, and concludes that what makes Alonso Quijano’s library modern is the predominance of poetry and fiction; what we nowadays think of as literature, rather than theology and the other disciplines that would have filled any library of the time; if, that is, someone were to make the strange decision to set aside space in their home for the accumulation and organization of books.
Cervantes’s masterpiece is a classic thanks to its ability to adapt to a future it generates itself. Because Don Quixote is the novel that has spawned the most novels. Over decades and centuries, its library has increasingly begun to resemble the libraries of the new generations of readers who began to put theology and the lives of the saints aside in order to take up their opposite: fantasy, realism, the picaresque, romance, and horror.
Thanks to his doubly imaginary library, Alonso Quijano, el Bueno, would be transformed into Don Quijote de la Mancha. It is his brilliant excuse for leaving that village in La Mancha whose name nobody will ever remember, that place which could be any hamlet in La Mancha, every hamlet in Castile, every small village anchored in a barren wasteland like so many boats marooned in a desert created by an evaporated lagoon, so he can abandon his sedentary life for as long as the dream lasts, switch from reading—which entails the contemplation of other people’s lives—to action, which means leading your own life so it can be contemplated by others, who are your readers; to expand the boundaries of his library and encounter dozens of narrators and readers, including readers of his apocryphal adventures, and become a traveller. Thanks to his infectious madness, Sancho Panza, or Sansón Carrasco, could also travel from the interior village to the port of Barcelona: from solid steppes to liquid sea.
The secret aim of that journey is to enable Don Quijote to acquaint himself with a print shop, to enter the ovule, matrix, and machine-room that nurtures his passion for reading, his losing of himself in books, and the womb that begets the books that nourish our libraries. And our travels. And our happy madness.
Jules Verne describes the library on the Nautilus in minute, fascinating detail. His tableau starts with a large number of books with a similar binding; he then broadens his focus to the furniture where they are lodged: copper-edged rosewood shelving—made from the coveted reddish-black timber of the guayacan—with alcoves beneath for comfortable, brown padded-leather settees; here and there are light, mobile desks where you can rest and consult a book for a moment, though it is the huge, central table that really invites you to study in depth. The library is lighted by four glass electric globes. Despite the luxurious furniture, the principal protagonists are the twelve thousand volumes that tirelessly roam the depths of the sea, the diffuse, murky, maternal waters of our collective unconscious.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is much more than a novel: it is one of those myths we all share. Jules Verne is much more than a writer: he is a popular axis equipped to generate compulsive reading, icons, utopias, and expectations. In the heart of that submarine are literary and scientific texts printed in every language, arranged with no regard to language, because Captain Nemo is a polyglot reader—from Homer and Xenophon to George Sand and Victor Hugo, from engineering and ballistics to hydrography and geology. Only two subjects are banned: economics and politics. As if the captain superstitiously believed that, by eliminating those disciplines, his boat could be spared the influence of international geopolitics.
For the first sixty pages of the novel, the narrator, on board an American ship, would have us believe we are hunting for a whale, the swiftest fugitive whale imaginable, that can furrow the seven seas so rapidly it seems to be teleported. Aronnax, the French scientist telling the story, is accompanied by Conseil, his servant, and the Canadian Ned Land, the king of harpooners, reminiscent of the tattooed Queequeg. Indeed, Jules Verne’s novel can be read as an inversion of Herman Melville’s: if in Moby Dick we experience the epic tale of how Captain Ahab’s obsession with the White Monster becomes a fight to the death, with shades of biblical apocalypse, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo’s dark side, the overpowering desire for revenge that he shares with Ahab, never dims the light of his scientific, technological project, the progress he pits against religious atavism. Captain Nemo is a scientist, a devotee of technology, and a collector: reason can measure and understand everything, except his uncontrollable anger. Both books share an enthusiasm for encyclopaedic knowledge: the desire to contain everything humanity knew at the time about the sea. If real experience on board a whaler gave Melville first-hand knowledge of things cetacean, experience he rounded out by reading books that also surface in his fiction (the zoological digressions are almost as huge as the whales themselves), Verne, by contrast, nourished his imagination, as ever, by burrowing away in his library.
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if libraries are a constant in his work. In his novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, set in a 1960s completely dominated by technology, he evokes the future of the Imperial Library; in a hundred years it has increased from eight hundred thousand to two million volumes, while the librarians in its literature section, due to an absence of readers, are either bored or asleep. Conversely, the protagonist of Voyage to the Centre of the Earth visits the library in Reykjavik and finds that its shelves are bare because its eight thousand volumes are constantly travelling, from house to house, around Iceland; the islanders are compulsive readers and the national library a fragmented, portable archipelago. Ciro Smith, in The Mysterious Island, where there is no library, is described as “a living library, always available and always open at the necessary page.” Nemo appears and dies in this novel: Smith meets him after walking through the Nautilus library, which is described as “a masterpiece full of masterpieces.” Sedentary or dynamic, monumental or nomadic, collective or individual, metropolitan or remote, the dozens of libraries Verne portrays are the backbone of his work, of his transmedia poetics.
After that initial description, the library on the Nautilus makes few appearances in the rest of the novel. Aronnax goes there mainly in search of explanations for the unknown phenomena or realities, like the island of Ceylon, that he discovers on his journey. Daily life on board the Nautilus is incredibly monotonous, with little in the way of adventure. In fact, apart from scenes like the battle against the giant squid or the crisis of the submarine getting caught in ice, this novel is more about knowledge than adventure. It is a hymn to positivism: observing, reading, taking notes, and developing theories on the basis of assembling thousands of specific cases, of direct experience of reality. “The spectacle of those waters rich in species through the glass panels of the sitting-room, the reading of the books in the library and the writing up of my notes occupied all my time and didn’t leave me a minute to feel bored or tired,” the narrator writes, and we can discern an order in his words: first, direct observation of nature; second, reading; and, finally, writing, thanks to which we can, through intermediaries, read and experience literature’s mirages.
In addition to being an adventure novel and marine encyclopaedia, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a genuine library immersed in the abyss of our imagination, as well as in that of Verne himself. Politically, it stands out as being opposed to empires. Stands out reconditely, because a self-portrait is concealed within the portrayal of Captain Nemo: a self-portrait of the traveller and revolutionary the sedentary writer would have loved to have been.
Imagine reality without nature or gardens, without paths crossing forests or beaches. Imagine a world without cities: devoid of streets, avenues, vehicles, traffic lights, bottlenecks, skyscrapers with roof gardens, concerts, tabloid newspapers or sports news or advertising. A universe without planets or jungles or urban metropolises or squares or cafés or street-corners. Imagine humanity without dawns or sunsets, without kindergartens, orphanages, fashion shows, markets, or slaughter-houses; without families, family get-togethers and holidays, or naughty children. Imagine, in brief, a world of shelves, a beehive exclusively dominated by the tyrannical logic of books.
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle encircled by very low railings”: thus begins “The Library of Babel,” one of the most famous stories by writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges, who imagines an infinite sphere without a centre. A bookish space illuminated by large globes of light, and a mirror beneath whose meagre, continuous light—due, I imagine, to the slow onset of blindness—human beings confront their state as librarians.
Librarians who, in this story, never stop moving. They are travellers. They are pilgrims. They are searching for a definitive answer that they will never find—because it doesn’t exist: all responses are provisional, soothing injections the effects of which quickly dissolve in the blood circulating in our veins. Each wall in each hexagon has five shelves; each shelf carries thirty-two books in a uniform edition; each book has four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, eighty letters, as black as I imagine the eyes of the readers disturbing the beehive—wasps, pollen, and bees.
A miniature version of the universe itself, an exploration of the Pythagorean idea of a mathematics that rules over everything, the music of the spheres, based on combinations of the letters of the alphabet, the story finds a place for all those phenomena that have influenced the history of books: their burning, their worship, their messianism. There’s also space for what didn’t yet exist when Borges was writing, in the 1940s: the internet as a textual network of hyperlinks, proof that any sentence could have been written in a Sisyphean world that never ceases to exponentially multiply its information load.
Consequently, “The Library of Babel”’s twin story is “The Book of Sand,” which Borges wrote thirty years later, and which tells the story of a Bible seller who offers the narrator a book with infinite pages. A book that is in itself an expanding library. A book that is the library of Babel. What the Book of Sand most resembles is a laptop connected to the internet. Like the library of Babel, the Book of Aleph and the Book of Sand are monstrous: Borges always talks about culture devouring, swallowing, digesting, and destroying us. His character is obsessed by the infinite book. He never leaves home. He shares his treasure with no one. He plays with the idea of burning it, but is afraid that the fire and smoke, like the book, will be never-ending. So he decides to hide it. “I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is a forest,” says the narrator. “Before retirement I worked for the National Library, which housed nine hundred thousand books; I knew that to the right of the lobby is a winding staircase that descends to the basement, where the maps and periodicals are stored.” He takes advantage of the employees’ lapse of concentration to hide the magical volume on one of the shelves eaten away by damp. It awaits us still in the catacombs of the National Library in Buenos Aires.
Perhaps two classic kinds of garden exist: the geometrically perfect French variety, with its sculpted hedges, polyhedric fountains, and carefully calculated perspectives, which communicates the idea that man can tame nature and control its minutest detail; and the romantic, ravishing English style, with its rustic meadows, would-be wild woods, which suggests a contrary notion: that natural beauty must be recreated in its exuberance and asymmetry, like a bonsai to a tree. Similarly, there are two main images for a library: one that is orderly and symmetrical, where everything is virtually attainable for readers, and another that is dusty and chaotic, a labyrinth that can hide monstrous books in its dark recesses. “The Library of Babel” is a synthesis of both of these. Order that can drive you mad. Infinite geometry that doesn’t soothe, but makes us dizzy.
“I believe I have mentioned the suicides, more frequent every year,” we read at the end of the story. When explaining his way of understanding theatre, Chekhov said that if a rifle were hanging on the wall in a work’s first scene, a bullet would be fired in the last act. In Borges’s version of that mechanism, it is the low rails at the start of the story that subtly invite one to jump (in a world where coffins don’t exist, the dead are cast into the void and fall eternally, their only bier a rush of air, or mourning). Those rails give way to the reasoning behind the depression and distress in that Library, also known to us as the Universe, the history of which is nihilist and leads to extinction. Philosophy, Borges says ironically, can be read as a branch of fantasy literature. From that perspective, theology might be a subgenre of horror. Distantly inspired by the few lines the Bible devotes to the collective collapse of the Tower—supposedly leading to the birth of all our languages—“The Library of Babel” is a horror story: it simulates the creation of a paradise, but really speaks of the eternal existence of hell.