It’s always the same ritual. Alberto Manguel enters, takes off his eternal hat, Conceição Santos comes to meet him, and the two talk briefly. Then they go to the cash register room at the end of which a table will serve as a support. There await the books that Conceição has sorted to determine what they contain, where they come from, where to store them.
These are works whose place in a library is not obvious. How to situate an Arab author who writes in French? Or a Russian who publishes in English? Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov are in this duality, recalls Manguel. Beckett lives between English and French. “We will have to think about it”, says the writer.
Sessions usually take place weekly or bi-weekly, depending on his schedule. We open three or four boxes each time. The process, set up almost a year ago, has borne fruit: authors such as Dante, Cervantes, Atwood, Cortázar and Borges, as well as works in Spanish and English, have already been “treaties”, which, in the language of librarians, means that they have been cataloged.
An “imperfect utopia”
A new library is being born in the depths of the old Lisbon Municipal Archives, in Alto da Eira Street [dans le centre historique]. Pound by pound, 40,000 in all. They belong to the private collection which Alberto Manguel donated to the Portuguese capital in September 2020, and which constitutes the collection of the Center for the Study of the History of Reading (CEHL), of which he will be the director. Currently under construction under the aegis of the architect Teresa Nunes da Ponte, the center will take up residence in the palace of the Marquis of Pombal once the work is completed, and has just been renamed “Espaço Atlântida” [Espace Atlantide]. First, because it sounds good, says Manguel, but above all “because Atlantis is an imperfect utopia” : engulfed by the ocean, it has resurfaced in literature several times since Plato.
His books will also emerge from the sort of forced hibernation in which they had been plunged since the Argentinian-Canadian author had left the medieval presbytery of Mondion, in France, where he had gathered all the works in his possession, previously scattered in various countries. They were repacked and shipped to Toronto, from where the approximately 800 crates then made their way to Portugal.
There, we understood that – imperfect utopia – there was no other possible method than to open them at random. And each unpacked work is rearranged in a new order, a new very personal configuration. Here, a book on an Arabic study of the Bible, there, a Odyssey of Homer in English, again another in Spanish. A Harlequin story, many Don Juan, a facsimile of the book that Rodolphe Töpffer, the inventor of the comic strip, dedicated to Goethe. The first novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, which he later disowned, with annotations in his own hand, and the first annotated edition of Morel’s Inventionthe book that dedicated him [traduit chez Robert Laffont]. The novel Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez [idem]which had previously been an essay on an unlikely life that “no one would believe”. Allegorizings [“Allégoriser”, non traduit] of Jan Morris, with whom Manguel maintained a regular correspondence, and, inside the book, the last letter which she wrote to him and could not send to him. It was given to him by his son after his death [en 2020].
Chatting with every book
One of the things that has impressed Conceição Santos the most since she started working alongside Alberto Manguel is the relationship he has with his books. “He takes a worke at random, from any crate, and he knows exactly what it is and what it’s about”, she confides in Express. In fact, he knows them well, even if not always to the same degree. “When I had my library in France, which brought together the different libraries that I had left in various places, people asked me if I had read everything. Of course not. But a book that comes into my house never goes directly to the library. I open it, I chat with him for at least five minutes, I know what he is talking about”, recognizes this book lover.
And that’s also what happens in this room: each book taken out of a crate is entitled to a word or a sentence that defines it, a summary of its contents, a commentary on how it got there . Sometimes an episode that reveals the huge amount of stories that could be told about the books themselves. “Did you know that Kipling’s tales were written with a specific word count because they were meant to be published in a newspaper?” Mangel asks.
Alberto Manguel is not a collec