A final chapter of A History of Reading offers a glimpse of a book that has yet to be written and that Alberto Manguel would love to read. It is called by a similar title but the indefinite has become definite; it is The History of Reading. It is, Manguel says, "amicably written . . . accessible and yet erudite, informative and yet reflective . . . the history this book records has been particularly difficult to grasp; it is made, so to speak, of its digressions . . . the author proceeds as if unaware of logical causality or historical continuity ..." This imaginary book sounds in fact like a continuation of the book under review.
Amical: the author tells us about his experiences with books learning to read, reading by torchlight under the bedclothes, reading aloud to the blind author Borges reading Rilke in a cafe in Paris, inserting his glasses between the pages as a bookmark.
Accessible: well over a hundred illustrations, information alternating with anecdote, a recognition that the reader contributes his own personality to the book that is being read.
Erudite: not until the 10th century did silent reading, as opposed to reading aloud, become usual in the West.
Informative: in 213 BC the Chinese emperor ordered that all the books in his realm should be burnt.
Reflective: the mere owning of a book can seem to be the equivalent of having absorbed its contents, making the troublesome act of reading it unnecessary.
One can share Manguel's love of reading and envy his encyclopaedic knowledge, not to mention his easy familiarity with several languages, but at the same time deplore his digressive method and lack of historical continuity in what is ostensibly a history. It is true that if the various items of this history were rearranged in chronological order it would be Just as unsatisfactory because many of the items seem chosen more for their anecdotal interest than for relevance to a theme.
It is entertaining to read that a Grand Vizier of Persia, "in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when travelling, he them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order", but this early example of the use of the alphabet as a key for retrieving volumes is one of the least interesting bits of the section on libraries.
A History of Reading is best considered as a series of essays to be browsed through, or as a bedtime book, or even, so many are the quotations, as an anthology about books and reading. It is fascinating to read that "by the time the first scribe scratched and uttered the first letters, the human body was already capable of the cads of writing and reading that still lay in the future; that is to say, the body was able to store, recall and decipher all manner of sensations, including the arbitrary signs of written language yet to be invented. This notion, that we are capable of reading before we can actually read - in fact, before we have even seen a page open in front of us - harks back to Platonic ideas of knowledge existing within us before the thing is perceived. Speech itself apparently evolves along the same pattern.
"I judge a book by its shape,"writes Manguel. The shape of this book, its size, its design and layout, are those of a book to be treasured, a repository of wisdom to be read with attention indoors, too large to be carried in the pocket or read comfortably in bed; it is a pity that the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the contents detracts from the seriousness of the author's intentions.