consulted without difficulty.

Another way to cope with the question of space is to restrict holdings, a method Manguel considers in “The Library as Power.” He tells of the seventeenth century mathematician, philosopher, and librarian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, coinventor of calculus, who argued for the collecting of only scientific books. Leibnitz also favored small books because they required less shelf space. Callimachus had expressed the same sentiment two thousand years earlier, writing Mega biblion, mega kakon, (a great book is a great evil), reflecting his dislike of unwieldy scrolls. In the next chapter, “The Library as Shadow,” Manguel examines examples of biblioclasm, such as the destruction of the texts of the Incas and Aztecs by the proselytizing Europeans. He includes pictures of book-burnings in Nazi Germany and in Warsaw, Indiana.

He returns to this subject later in “The Library as Oblivion.” He describes the destruction of the Turgenev Library, established in Paris in 1875 by the Russian expatriate novelist Ivan Turgenev for émigré students from his homeland. According to the novelist Nina Berberova, it was the finest Russian library outside Russia; it has vanished. In 2003, in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq, that country’s national library was looted as American troops stood by idly. Lost were clay tablets dating back millennia, medieval manuscripts, and later examples of Arabic calligraphy.

Still, as Manguel discusses in “The Library as Survival,” some works escape even the most determined efforts to destroy them. He tells of a Jewish prayer book for the Sabbath that he owns; the work was printed in Berlin in 1908. On May 10, 1933, the Nazis held the first of their many book-burnings that targeted Jewish authors and Jewish books, though not limited to them. Nevertheless, somehow this prayer book survived. So did the volumes of the Sholem Aleichem Library in Biaa Podlaska, Poland. Manguel tells of its librarian, who hid its holdings in an attic, where they were found after World War II. These books serve as witnesses to the atrocities perpetrated on their readers.

For all the books that have been written and survived, many others exist only in the realm of the imagination. Manguel discusses these in his thirteenth chapter. Manguel used to read to Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine author who served as head of the Buenos Aires National Library and who wrote about imaginary works such as the romances by the fictional Herbert Quain, the eleventh volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, or a play by Jaromir Hladik called The Enemies. One of Borges’s best-known tales concerns the fictional “Library of Babel,” which contains all books. A less comprehensive but no less imaginary collection appears in the seventh chapter of Pantagruel (1532) by François Rabelais. Here the eponymous hero visits the actual Library of St. Victor in Paris, which contained theological works of no interest to humanists such as Rabelais. He therefore satirized the holdings by creating his own catalog. Entries include Bragueta juris (the codpiece of the law), Ars honeste petandi in societate (the art of farting decently in public), and The Knavish Tricks of Ecclesiastical Judges. The seventeenth century English writer Sir Thomas Browne published a list of imaginary books in 1653. Included here were Greek poems by Ovid, composed while he was in exile on the shore of the Black Sea, and a Spanish translation of the works of Confucius. Manguel relates that at Gad’s Hill, the novelist Charles Dickens created a trompe l’oeil collection with such titles as Hansard’sGuide to Refreshing Sleep and a ten-volume Catalogue of the Statues to the Duke of Wellington. Paul Masson, who worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, supplemented its limited holdings in fifteenth century Latin and Italian books by adding fictional entries to the catalog. Some fictional libraries contain real books. Such is the collection of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869-1870; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1873) or the one destroyed early in the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615).

Manguel keeps a list of imaginary books that he would like to own should they ever be written. As he points out in “The Library as Identity,” one’s holdings and wish lists reveal much about a person. One looks over the shelves of a personal library not only to find unfamiliar titles but also to learn about the owner. Jay Gatsby, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), understood that a library was essential for anyone pretending to gentility, though he did not feel obliged to read any of the books he owned and so left the pages uncut. Petronius’s Trimalchio similarly sought prestige and the appearance of learning by declaring that he owned three libraries, one Greek and the others Latin. These fictional characters differ from Gordian II, the third century Roman emperor whom Edward Gibbon describes as having had twenty-two concubines and sixty-two thousand volumes and whose productions show that both were intended for use rather than for show.

Manguel’s wide-ranging survey of books and libraries provides delightful reading and demonstrates that, like the younger Gordian, Manguel has gathered his books for use rather than for ostentation. Into such a work, the occasional error is bound to creep. Manguel celebrates the endurance of the Domesday Book, written, he says, with ink on paper. In fact, the Domesday Book was written on parchment. The caption of a picture of a bookcase once owned by Samuel Pepys locates the diarist’s library at Oxford; his collection and bookcases are at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Seventy of Pepys’s manuscripts are, however, at the Bodleian. Manguel places the Codex Sinaiticus among the manuscripts owned by the English renaissance bibliophile Robert Cotton. This early manuscript of the Bible in Greek remained at the monastery of St. Catherine until 1859 and came to England only in 1933. The caption to the reproduction of the 1644 title page of Gabriel Naudé’s Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Advice on Establishing a Library, 1950) describes it as belonging to the first edition of the publication, even though the title page states “Seconde Edition”; the first edition had appeared seventeen years earlier. These are cavils, but Yale had more than a year to correct these errors after the first edition appeared in 2006 in Canada. Still, all bibliophiles will enjoy dipping into Manguel’s work in their libraries at night.