The Tyranny of the Library

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children’s Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not—or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader—the curious reader, the alert reader—to rescue the books from the category to which it has been condemned.

Quotation: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, London, Penguin, 2014

No Need to Grudge Taking a Little Trouble

The usual demand in such a work is that it shall be written in a "popular" style and in "popular" language--in other words, that all technical terms shall be avoided in descriptions. Books of this class are in the majority of cases unsatisfactory, usually lacking that scientific accuracy which is the first requirement of such works, but chiefly being defective in conciseness of description and exactness of phraseology. They fail to satisfy those who want scientific descriptions, and are not sufficiently explicit for those who have little knowledge of the subjects treated of.

A large technical vocabulary has grown up round the literature of ferns, which it is impossible to ignore altogether. No one can claim to a knowledge of these plants without knowing something also of this terminology; for it is impossible to examine ferns without finding characters and points of structure which our ordinary vocabulary fails to describe aptly. There is hardly any pursuit or study which has not a terminology of its own, and the student of ferns will find that there is such a terminology in his branch, and that it has to be mastered before he can make satisfactory progress in the identification of species.

The author has therefore deemed it advisable to write the descriptive part of the work in technical language, avoiding, however, all unnecessary multiplication of terms; and at the same time--by a clear introductory chapter on the structure of ferns and their allies, and by the aid of a complete glossary--to enable the reader to understand every term used. There is no serious difficulty in mastering these terms, as a little patient application will prove, and there is no satisfactory way of avoiding their use without sacrificing the scientific value of the descriptions.

If any are afraid to enter upon the study of our ferns because there are some apparently hard names to be got over, we would advise such persons to turn their attention to something else. If the subject is worth studying, no one need grudge taking a little trouble about it.

Quotation: Thomson, George Malcolm. The Ferns and Fern Allies of New Zealand: with instructions for their collection and hints on their cultivation. Dunedin: Wise & Co, 1882. p.vi

Charles Conversation

Charles conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody’s ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams.

…

She was getting generally more irritated with him.  As he grew older he became grosser in his ways.  He used to whittle down the corks of the empty bottles during dessert.  He sucked his teeth after eating.  When he drank soup he made a gulping noise at every mouthful. And now that he had begun to put on weight, his puffy cheeks seemed to be pushing his eyes, which had always been small, right up into his temples.

Quotation from: Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Stopping Time

I too read in bed. In the long succession of beds in which I spent the nights of my childhood, in strange hotel rooms where the lights of passing cars swept eerily across the ceiling, in houses whose smells and sounds were unfamiliar to me, in summer cottages sticky with sea spray or where the mountain air was so dry that a steaming basin of eucalyptus water was placed by my side to help me breathe, the combination of bed and book granted me a sort of home which I knew I could go back to, night after night, under whichever skies. 

No one would call out and ask me to do this or that; my body needed nothing, immobile under the sheets. What took place, took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened because I turned the pages. I don’t think I can remember a greater comprehensive joy than that of coming to the few last pages and setting the book down, so that the end would not take place until at least tomorrow, and sinking back into my pillow with the sense of having actually stopped time.

Quotation from: A History of Reading by Aberto Manguel, London, Penguin, 2014.