The Library at Night Alberto Manguel Alberto Manguel's The history of Reading, an "awe-inspiring" work of "erudition"(Times Literary Supplement), received the Medicis Prize. The Library at Night, a beautifully rendered meditation on the meaning of libraries through history, from Alexandria through the virtual library of Google, is his most important book since then. A humanist's journey, The Library at Night asks why we insist on collecting books and putting them on shelves, alphabetizing then or defiantly using other systems of organization, all of them "arbitrary". The book starts with the personal - Manguel's own library, which he created in a fifteenth-century barn near the Loire Valley, an idyllic room where knowledge and memory are deeply entwined. Manguel's favorite time to be there is at night, when "the world can be comfortably reimagined" – though he is quick to tell us that Montaigne refused to dwell in his library at night. In the course of this volume, Manguel looks at libraries from fifteen distinct perspectives; […] […] In "The Library as Myth", Manguel conjures the Tower of Babel, which he considers a library of tongues, and the archetypal library of volumes in Alexandria about which so much is unknown. In "the Library as Shape", Manguel discusses the library from an architectural perspective, taking such examples as the Berlin library designed by Norman Foster that is shaped like a skull and known as "The Brain" and the monumental French library inspired by the ruins of ancient Rome. In "The Library as Survival," Manguel tells the haunting tale of the Sholem Aleichem Library in Poland, where books were saved from the Nazis though their readers perished. Additionally, Manguel writes of "memory libraries", censored libraries, and libraries of books never written, such as Lovecraft's Necronomicon. […] International acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading, and Reading Pictures Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. He was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Canada in 1982, and now lives in France, where he was named an Officer of the Order for Arts and Letters. His most recent books are The City of Words and The Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography.