A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1998

  Copyright © 1996 by Alberto Manguel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 1998. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 1996. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace ownership of copyright materials. Information enabling the Publisher to rectify any reference or credit in future editions will be welcomed.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Manguel, Alberto, 1948–

  A history of reading

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36419-7

  1. Books and reading — History. 2. Reading — History. I. Title.

  Z1003.M35 1997 028’.09 C96-930984-8

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s Web site: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  TO CRAIG STEPHENSON,

  That day she put our heads together,

  Fate had her imagination about her,

  My head so much concerned with outer

  Yours with inner weather.

  — After Robert Frost —

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Over the seven years that this book was in the making,

  I’ve accumulated a fair number of debts of gratitude. The notion of writing a history of reading began with an attempt to write an essay; Catherine Yolles suggested that the subject deserved a whole book — my gratitude to her for her confidence.

  Thanks to my editors — Louise Dennys, most gracious of readers, whose friendship has supported me since the faraway days of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places; Nan Graham, who stood by the book at the very beginning, and Courtney Hodell, whose enthusiasm accompanied it to the end; Philip Gwyn Jones, whose encouragement helped me read on through difficult passages.

  Painstakingly and with Sherlockian skill, Gena Gorrell and Beverley Beetham Endersby copyedited my manuscript: to them my thanks, as usual. Paul Hodgson designed the book with intelligent care. My agents Jennifer Barclay and Bruce Westwood kept wolves, bank managers and tax collectors from my door.

  A number of friends made kind suggestions — Marina Warner, Giovanna Franci, Dee Fagin, Ana Becciú, Greg Gatenby,

  Carmen Criado, Stan Persky, Simone Vauthier. Professor Amos Luzzatto, Professor Roch Lecours, M. Hubert Meyer and Fr. F.A. Black generously agreed to read and correct a few individual chapters; the errors remaining are all my own. Sybel Ayse Tuzlac did some of the early research. My heartfelt thanks to the library staff who dug out odd books for me and patiently answered my unacademic questions at the Metro Toronto Reference Library, Robarts Library, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library — all in Toronto — Bob Foley and the staff of the library at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Bibliothèque Humaniste in Sélestat, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the American Library in Paris, the Bibliothèque de l’Université de Strasbourg, the Bibliothèque Municipale in Colmar, the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the London Library and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice. I also wish to thank the Maclean Hunter Arts Journalism Programme and the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Pages Bookstore in Calgary, where parts of this book were first read.

  It would have been impossible for me to complete this book without financial assistance from the pre-Harris Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council, as well as from the George Woodcock fund.

  In memoriam Jonathan Warner, whose support and advice I very much miss.

  TO THE READER

  Reading has a history.

  ROBERT DARNTON

  The Kiss of Lamourette, 1990

  For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  “Sir Thomas Browne”, 1923

  But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?

  DENIS DIDEROT

  Jaques le Fataliste et son maître, 1796

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  THE LAST PAGE

  The Last Page

  ACTS OF READING

  Reading Shadows

  The Silent Readers

  The Book of Memory

  Learning to Read

  The Missing First Page

  Picture Reading

  Being Read To

  The Shape of the Book

  Private Reading

  Metaphors of Reading

  POWERS OF THE READER

  Beginnings

  Ordainers of the Universe

  Reading the Future

  The Symbolic Reader

  Reading within Walls

  Stealing Books

  The Author as Reader

  The Translator as Reader

  Forbidden Reading

  The Book Fool

  ENDPAPER PAGES

  Endpaper Pages

  NOTES

  Plate Credits

  THE LAST

  PAGE

  Read in order to live.

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Letter to Mlle de Chantepie, June 1857

  A universal fellowship of readers. From left to right, top to bottom: the young Aristotle by Charles Degeorge, Virgil by Ludger tom Ring the Elder, Saint Dominic by Fra Angelico, Paolo and Francesca by Anselm Feuerbach, two Islamic students by an anonymous illustrator, the Child Jesus lecturing in the Temple by disciples of Martin Schongauer, the tomb of Valentine Balbiani by Germain Pilon, Saint Jerome by a follower of Giovanni Bellini, Erasmus in his study by an unknown engraver. (photo credit p1.1)

  THE LAST PAGE

  ne hand limp by his side, the other to his brow, the young Aristotle languidly reads a scroll unfurled on his lap, sitting on a cushioned chair with his feet comfortably crossed. Holding a pair of clip glasses over his bony nose, a turbaned and bearded Virgil turns the pages of a rubricated volume in a portrait painted fifteen centuries after the poet’s death. Resting on a wide step, his right hand gently holding his chin, Saint Dominic is absorbed in the book he holds unclasped on his knees, deaf to the world. Two lovers, Paolo and Francesca, are huddled under a tree, reading a line of verse that will lead them to their doom: Paolo, like Saint Dominic, is touching his chin with his hand; Francesca is holding the book open, marking with two fingers a page that will never be reached. On their way to medical school, two Islamic students from the twelfth century stop to consult a passage in one of the books they are carrying. Pointing to the right-hand page of a book open on his lap, the Child Jesus explains his reading to the elders in the Temple while they, astonished and unconvinced, vainly turn the pages of their respective tomes in search of a refutation.

  Beautiful as when she was alive, watched by an attentive lap-dog, the Milanese noblewoman Valentina Balbiani flips through the pages of her marble book on the lid of a tomb that carries, in bas-relief, the image of her emaciated body. Far from the busy city, amid sand and parched rocks, Saint Jerome, like an elderly commuter awaiting a train, reads a tabloid-sized manuscript while, in a corner, a lion lies listening. The great humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus shares with his friend Gilbert Cousin a joke in the book he is reading, held open on the lectern in front of him. Kneeling among oleander blossoms, a seventeenth-century Indian poet strokes his beard as he reflects on the verses he’s just read out loud to himself to catch their full flavour,
clasping the preciously bound book in his left hand. Standing next to a long row of roughly hewn shelves, a Korean monk pulls out one of the eighty thousand wooden tablets of the seven-centuries-old Tripitaka Koreana and holds it in front of him, reading with silent attention. “Study To Be Quiet” is the advice given by the unknown stained-glass artist who portrayed the fisherman and essayist Izaak Walton reading a little book by the shores of the River Itchen near Winchester Cathedral.

  From left to right, top to bottom: a Mogul poet by Muhammad Ali, the library at the Haeinsa Temple in Korea, Izaak Walton by an anonymous nineteenth-century English artist, Mary Magdalene by Emmanuel Benner, Dickens giving a reading, a young man on the Paris quais. (photo credit 1.1)

  Stark naked, a well-coiffed Mary Magdalen, apparently unrepentant, lies on a cloth strewn over a rock in the wilderness, reading a large illustrated volume. Drawing on his acting talents, Charles Dickens holds up a copy of one of his own novels, from which he is going to read to an adoring public. Leaning on a stone parapet overlooking the Seine, a young man loses himself in a book (what is it?) held open in front of him. Impatient or merely bored, a mother holds up a book for her red-haired son as he tries to follow the words with his right hand on the page. The blind Jorge Luis Borges screws up his eyes the better to hear the words of an unseen reader. In a dappled forest, sitting on a mossy trunk, a boy holds in both hands a small book from which he’s reading in soft quiet, master of time and of space.

  From left to right: a mother teaching her son to read by Gerard ter Borch, Jorge Luis Borges by Eduardo Comesaña, a forest scene by Hans Toma. (photo credit 1.2)

  All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, responsibility and power they derive from reading, are common with mine.

  I am not alone.

  I first discovered that I could read at the age of four. I had seen, over and over again, the letters that I knew (because I had been told) were the names of the pictures under which they sat. The boy drawn in thick black lines, dressed in red shorts and a green shirt (that same red and green cloth from which all the other images in the book were cut, dogs and cats and trees and thin tall mothers), was also somehow, I realized, the stern black shapes beneath him, as if the boy’s body had been dismembered into three clean-cut figures: one arm and the torso, b; the severed head so perfectly round, o; and the limp, low-hanging legs, y. I drew eyes in the round face, and a smile, and filled in the hollow circle of the torso. But there was more: I knew that not only did these shapes mirror the boy above them, but they also could tell me precisely what the boy was doing, arms stretched out and legs apart. The boy runs, said the shapes. He wasn’t jumping, as I might have thought, or pretending to be frozen into place, or playing a game whose rules and purpose were unknown to me. The boy runs.

  And yet these realizations were common acts of conjuring, less interesting because someone else had performed them for me. Another reader — my nurse, probably — had explained the shapes and now, every time the pages opened to the image of this exuberant boy, I knew what the shapes beneath him meant. There was pleasure in this, but it wore thin. There was no surprise.

  Then one day, from the window of a car (the destination of that journey is now forgotten), I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; perhaps the car stopped for a moment, perhaps it just slowed down long enough for me to see, large and looming, shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality. I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful. I could read.

  What that word was on the long-past billboard I no longer know (vaguely I seem to remember a word with several in it), but the impression of suddenly being able to comprehend what before I could only gaze at is as vivid today as it must have been then. It was like acquiring an entirely new sense, so that now certain things no longer consisted merely of what my eyes could see, my ears could hear, my tongue could taste, my nose could smell, my fingers could feel, but of what my whole body could decipher, translate, give voice to, read.

  The readers of books, into whose family I was unknowingly entering (we always think that we are alone in each discovery, and that every experience, from death to birth, is terrifyingly unique), extend or concentrate a function common to us all. Reading letters on a page is only one of its many guises. The astronomer reading a map of stars that no longer exist; the Japanese architect reading the land on which a house is to be built so as to guard it from evil forces; the zoologist reading the spoor of animals in the forest; the card-player reading her partner’s gestures before playing the winning card; the dancer reading the choreographer’s notations, and the public reading the dancer’s movements on the stage; the weaver reading the intricate design of a carpet being woven; the organ-player reading various simultaneous strands of music orchestrated on the page; the parent reading the baby’s face for signs of joy or fright, or wonder; the Chinese fortune-teller reading the ancient marks on the shell of a tortoise; the lover blindly reading the loved one’s body at night, under the sheets; the psychiatrist helping patients read their own bewildering dreams; the Hawaiian fisherman reading the ocean currents by plunging a hand into the water; the farmer reading the weather in the sky — all these share with book-readers the craft of deciphering and translating signs. Some of these readings are coloured by the knowledge that the thing read was created for this specific purpose by other human beings — music notation or road signs, for instance — or by the gods — the tortoise shell, the sky at night. Others belong to chance.

  And yet, in every case, it is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

  An example of Chia-ku-wen, or “bone-and-shell script”, on a tortoise carapace, c. 1300–1100 BC. (photo credit 1.3)

  I didn’t learn to write until much later, until I was seven. I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading. Reading — I discovered — comes before writing. A society can exist — many do exist — without writing,1 but no society can exist without reading. According to the ethnologist Philippe Descola,2 societies without writing have a linear sense of time, while in societies called literate the sense of time is cumulative; both societies move within those different but equally complex times by reading the multitude of signs the world has to offer. Even in societies that set down a record of their passing, reading precedes writing; the would-be writer must be able to recognize and decipher the social system of signs before setting them down on the page. For most literate societies — for Islam, for Jewish and Christian societies such as my own, for the ancient Mayas, for the vast Buddhist cultures — reading is at the beginning of the social contract; learning how to read was my rite of passage.

  Once I had learned to read my letters, I read everything: books, but also notices, advertisements, the small type on the back of tramway tickets, letters tossed into the garbage, weathered newspapers caught under my bench in the park, graffiti, the back covers of magazines held by other readers in the bus. When I found that Cervantes, in his fondness for reading, read “even the bits of torn paper in the street”,3 I knew exactly what urge drove him to this scavenging. This worship of the book (on scroll, paper or screen) is one of the tenets of a literate society. Islam takes the notion even further: the Koran is not only one of the creations of God but one of His attributes, l
ike His omnipresence or His compassion.

  Experience came to me first through books. When later in life I came across an event or circumstance or character similar to one I had read about, it usually had the slightly startling but disappointing feeling of déjà vu, because I imagined that what was now taking place had already happened to me in words, had already been named. The earliest extant Hebrew text of systematic, speculative thought — the SeferYezirah, written sometime in the sixth century — states that God created the world by means of thirty-two secret paths of wisdom, ten Sefirot or numbers and twenty-two letters.4 From the Sefirot were created all abstract things; from the twenty-two letters were created all the real beings in the three strata of the cosmos — the world, time and the human body. The universe, in Judaeo-Christian tradition, is conceived of as a written Book made from numbers and letters; the key to understanding the universe lies in our ability to read these properly and master their combination, and thereby learn to give life to some part of that colossal text, in imitation of our Maker. (According to a fourth-century legend, the Talmudic scholars Hanani and Hoshaiah would once a week study the SeferYezirah and, by the right combination of letters, create a three-year-old calf which they would then have for dinner.)

  My books were to me transcriptions or glosses of that other, colossal Book. Miguel de Unamuno,5 in a sonnet, speaks of Time, whose source is in the future; my reading life gave me that same impression of flowing against the current, living out what I had read. The street outside the house was full of malignant men going about their murky business. The desert, which lay not far from our house in Tel Aviv, where I lived until the age of six, was prodigious because I knew there was a City of Brass buried under its sands, just beyond the asphalt road. Jelly was a mysterious substance which I had never seen but which I knew about from Enid Blyton’s books, and which never matched, when I finally tasted it, the quality of that literary ambrosia. I wrote to my far-away grandmother, complaining about some minor misery and thinking she’d be the source of the same magnificent freedom my literary orphans found when they discovered long-lost relatives; instead of rescuing me from my sorrows, she sent the letter to my parents, who found my complaints mildly amusing. I believed in sorcery, and was certain that one day I’d be granted three wishes which countless stories had taught me how not to waste. I prepared myself for encounters with ghosts, with death, with talking animals, with battle; I made complicated plans for travel to adventurous islands on which Sinbad would become my bosom friend. Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover’s body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actual event.