The Study & Library of Cervantes

The House of Miguel de Cervantes in Valladolid, Spain*

"In Valladolid, readers of Don Quixote can stroll through the house occupied by Miguel de Cervantes from 1602 to 1605, the year in which the first part of the novel was published, and experience a voyeuristic thrill . . . . The house, though carefully restored, has necessarily been furnished with bits and pieces that never were in Crevantes's possession. Only the study, on the second floor, contains a few objects that most certainly belonged to him: not the "ebony and ivory" desk described in the will of his daughter, Isabel de Cervantes, but another, also mentioned in the document, "made of walnut, the largest one I possess," two paintings, one of Saint John and the other of the Virgin, a copper brazier, a chest for keeping papers and a single bookshelf holding some of the titles mentioned in his work. In this room he wrote several stories for his Exemplary Novels, and here he must have discussed with his friends the conception of his singular Quixote."

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, pp. 182-3.

*By Lourdes Cardenal - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1860473

Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Settings I’d Love to Visit 

I’ve been to two of these locations (but only through reading about them since one is fictional and the other historical).  However, the rest are real and remain in my mind's eye as places to travel to – but wherever I go, I try and stop in a bookstore or library while I’m visiting! What bookish places do you like to visit?

The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges

The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles, California

Strahov Monastery, Prague, Czech Republic

State Law Library of  Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa

Library of Alexandria

Library at Seikei University, Musashino, Japan

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, France

Zhongsuhge-Hangzhou bookstore, Hangzhou China

 Copenhagen Library, Denmark

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Via The Broke and the Bookish

Libraries and Ray Bradbury

While I am not self-educated in the same way as Ray Bradbury I do have a love for libraries based on my experiences that resonate with his.  From an early age I had a special relationship with libraries.  First it was spending summers visiting my hometown library for reading program books and others (I loved the history of British kings and retain an interest in history).  Later it was the High School library and memories of driving to other towns and the Whitewater College library for research papers.  When I entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from my Freshman year thru Graduate School, I often was ensconced in the Memorial Library stacks reading, even if not always for a class.  Since then my personal library which I began with my parents help at an early age has expanded every year.  With this in mind you may better understand why I was moved by the following excerpt from The Paris Review's interview with Ray Bradbury.


"I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. 

I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school." 

The Paris Review, Spring 2010

Imaginary Libraries

Libraries of imaginary books delight us because they allow thus the pleasure of creation without the effort of research and writing.  But they are also doubly disturbing--first because they cannot be collected, and secondly because they cannot be read.  Theses promising treasures must remain closed to all readers.  Every one of them can claim the title Kipling gives to the never-to-be-written tale of the young bank clerk Charlie Mears, "The Finest Story in the World."  And yet  the hunt for such imaginary books, though necessarily fruitless, remains compelling.  What devotee of horror stories has not dreamt of coming upon a copy of the Necronomicon, the demonic manual invented by H. P. Lovecraft in his dark Cthulhu saga?  According to Lovecraft, the Al Azif (to give it its original title) was written by Abdul Alhazred  c. 730 in Damascus.  In 950 it was translated into Greek under the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, bu the sole copy was burnt by the Patriarch Michael in 1050.  In 1228 Olaus translated the original (now lost) into Latin.  A copy of the work is supposed kept in the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, "one well known for certain forbidden manuscripts and books gradually accumulated over a period of centuries and begun in colonial times."

Not all imaginary libraries contain imaginary books.  The library that the barber and the priest condemn to the flames in the first part of Don Quixote;  Mr. Casaubon's scholarly library in George Eliot's Middlemarch;  Des Esseintes's languorous library in Huysman's A Rebours;  the murderous monastic library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose . . .  all these are merely wishful.  Given money enough and time, such dream libraries could find a solid reality.  


from The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, pp 283-84.

Active Shadows of a Writer's Life

My Unwritten Books 
by George Steiner


"A book unwritten is more than a void.  It accompanies the work one has done like an active shadow, both ironic and sorrowful."  - George Steiner


In Alberto Manguel's wonderful compendium of libraries, The Library at Night, he writes:
"We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if the are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are."

This idea, and I share his feelings along with the distress of finding books that I would love to have in my library but are too dear for my pocketbook, as expressed in the line "even if they have not yet been written" leads me to a wonderful book that is in my library, My Unwritten Books by George Steiner; described as a "grand master of erudition", he is a both polymath and eclectic as a thinker and writer of prose, both fictional and non-fictional.
In My Unwritten Books he imagines seven books that he did not write, but would have written if only he had not met some insurmountable physical, intellectual or psychological obstacle that prevented him from doing so. The essays describing these books are mini-books in themselves with excursions into such disparate worlds as the multiple languages of sex, the claims of Zionism, the natures of exile and a theology of emptiness.

My favorite among the essays is his personal excursion into the nature of education, "School Terms". Beginning with his own anarchic education that saw the onset of his school life with three languages while studying in Manhattan and France. All this before spending his university years at the University of Chicago and Harvard and completing his graduate work at Oxford. He contrasts the differences between education in France (orderly) and America (anarchic) and moves on to a brief commentary on some of the changes that these systems, especially in Great Britain are currently undergoing. With a flick of his pen, he highlights educational philosophies and movements from Locke and Rousseau through the battle between humanities and science of C. P. Snow whose polemics he decries. But this is used as a catalyst for his own thoughts on education. We must first consider what literacy means in our technological age with the immanent rise of "artificial intelligence" and the ubiquity of the Internet.

Steiner concludes that "the hope of preserving or resuscitating humanistic literacy in any traditional mode" is illusory. Yet, he goes on to suggest a "Utopian" plan or outline of a core curriculum that will provide to arouse the "awareness interactive with the demands and fascination of the world". (p 151)
He calls this plan a new "quadrivium" of mathematics, music, architecture, and the life sciences. Aimed at challenging the senses to "embody an incommensurable potential for fun, play, and aesthetic delight. Homo ludens is enlisted to the turbulent heart of his being." (p 159) 
This is heady stuff as Utopian plans often are. But it is exciting and challenging as George Steiner engages with the reader in sharing ideas in these notes for his "unwritten books". For even greater stimulation I would encourage readers to engage in his written books. His works are part of my own partially realized ideal library. By this I mean the sort of ideal that is characterized best by Alberto Manguel in another of his fascinating books, A Reader on Reading, where he writes:

"The ideal library is meant for one particular reader. Every reader must feel that he or she is the chosen one." "The ideal library (like every library) holds at least one line that has been written exclusively for you."

My Unwritten Books by George Steiner.  New Directions Books, 2006.
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel.  Yale University Press, 2006.
A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel.  Yale University Press, 2010.

Reading Begins at Home

Books from my Parents' Library

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”   ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice


Before I was born and continuing after I arrived along with my sister (two years later) my parents had a small library in the home where we were raised.  This library consisted of  bookshelves that spread along one wall of our living room;  shelves that were filled with books from my earliest memory.  These books formed a not insignificant part of my reading from my earliest days - they were the source of such early reads as the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and more.  As I grew older and read more I remember my first encounters with Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I became a life-long fan of Stevenson's writing, but above all I still keep and cherish an age-worn copy of  A Child's Garden of Verses because  it was one of my mother's books from when she was a very young girl.   It was from those shelves that I experienced my first taste of horror and speculative fiction with Edgar Allan Poe and dipped my toe into the world of Dante whom I do not claim to have understood on my first encounter.   What I could understand a bit better was the development of Jane Eyre from her terrible days in boarding school to her romantic encounters with Mr. Rochester, or Carol Kennicott and the events on Main Street depicted by Sinclair Lewis.  Along the reading way I acquired my own bookshelves in my bedroom.  It was here I began my own collection of classics like Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain,  The Jungle Books of Kipling,  and a collection of biographies of scientists and inventors like Michael Faraday, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Edison.
   
Later in my teen years I opened a tome that changed my life, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand whose heroic architect, Howard Roark, was among the heroes that I admired in my reading.  Heroes like Roark included Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo.   Dumas' novel was a book I read as part of my school reading which augmented that program of reading that already had a sturdy foundation built at home.  There were other books for school including Willa Cather's My Antonia, Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days,  and the wonderful tale of immigrants, Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag.  These and many more as my reading for school expanded in high school and University.

My sister and I both spent many hours at the local library, The Matheson Memorial Library, in our home town.  It was there that we encountered many other authors and books that we enjoyed reading.  I first met Philip Carey on those shelves as Somerset Maugham's tale Of Human Bondage mesmerized me much as Jane Eyre had some years earlier.  The library books were a luxury that we could afford because they were free for us to read and make our own.  This was all part of a reading life that began in the home and did not stop, but continued during our school years as an independent and important part of our lives.  With all of our reading, in school, in the library, in the park and around town, and the reading that continues to this day, both my Sister and I continue to live in homes that are filled with books.  Because our love of reading had its start in the home of our parents with their library of books that they read and cherished as well.

From the Journal of Thoreau

To the Libraries

February 3, 1852

I have been to the libraries (yesterday) at Cambridge and Boston . It would seem as if all things compelled us to originality . How happens it that I find not in the country, in the fields and woods, the works even of likeminded naturalists and poets. Those who have expressed the purest and deepest love of nature have not recorded it on the bark of the trees with the lichens ; they have left no memento of it there ; but if I would read their books I must go to the city, - so strange and repulsive both to them and to me, - and deal with men and institutions with whom I have no sympathy. When I Have just been there on this errand, it seems too great a price" to pay for access even to the works of Homer, or Cliaucer, or tamixus. Greece and Asia Minor should henceforth bear Iliads and Odysseys as their trees lichens .

But no! if the works of nature are to any extent collected in the forest, the works of man are to a still greater extent collected in the city . I have sometimes imagined a library, i . e . a collection of the works of true poets, philosophers, naturalists, etc., deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded and dusty city, guarded by cold-blooded and methodical officials and preyed on by bookworms, in which you own no share, and are not likely to, but rather far away in the depths of a primitive forest, like the ruins of Central America, where you can trace a series of crumbling alcoves, the older books protecting the most modern from the elements, partially buried by the luxuriance of nature, which the heroic student could reach only after adventures in the wilderness amid wild beasts and wild men. That, to my imagination, seems a fitter place for these interesting relics, which owe no small part of their interest to their antiquity, and whose occasion is nature, than the well-preserved edifice, with its well-preserved officials on the side of a city's square. More terrible than lions and tigers these Cerberuses. Access to nature for original observation is secures:

by one ticket, by one kind of expense, but access to the works of your predecessors by a very different kind of expense. All things tend to cherish the originality of the original. Nature, at least, takes no pains to introduce him to the works of his predecessors, but only presents him with her own Opera Omnia.

Is it the lover of nature who has access to all that has been written on the subject of his favorite studies ?

Source: Walden.org

Also found in The Journal: 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau, Damion Searls, ed. NYRB Classics, 2009. (pp 110-11)