The Author

Alberto Manguel is a Canadian writer with roots in Argentina who was born in Buenos Aires in 1948 then lived for 7 years of his life in Israel before returning to Argentina. While in Argentina he became a reader to the famous writer Jorges Lois Borges. As an adult he has lived in Italy, France, England and Tahiti in addition to Canada where he became a citizen in 1985.

He has lead just as diverse a life as a writer. In addition to A History of Reading and books like it, he has written a novel, News from a Foreign Country Came, which won the McKitterick Prize for best novel. He has also edited numerous anthologies and translated several books. And he has done all of this without ever receiving a college degree.
 
 

“Reading Shadows” (pp. 26-39)

This chapter opens by looking backwards to the far, far distant past - the fourth millennium and smallish clay tablets from Syria. These tablets are some of the first evidence we have of writing. The chapter speaks of how an early farmer read them and how even now thousands of years later modern people still interact with the tablets.

The process of reading - what happens in our brains and eyes that allow us to communicate in this complex way - is a large part of Manguel's focus here. He begins with the eyes and their importance to reading. [Here I found it odd that he doesn't mention Braille at all. In a way blind people “see” with their fingers but Manguel doesn't mention how he feels about this. It seems to me to that it is much the same process only different tools are used for the first decoding]. Manguel looks at great minds from the past: Euclid and Galen thought some something from the reader left and returned with the image, Epicurus and Aristotle thought the opposite - that the outside thing sent some message to the person. Euclid and Galen were more right than the others but Al-Haytham, who lived in Egypt during the 11th century, also garners much attention here with his groundbreaking theory concerning perception. Al-Haytham made a distinction between “pure sensation” and “perception” and believed that perception is an act while “pure sensation” is voluntary. Both Al-Haytham and Manguel point out that seeing or reading something is not really seeing or reading if the person does not pay attention. The seer must be attentive to truly “see”.

Later Manguel looks at modern times where there is still not a satisfactory explanation of the reading process. Modern neurolinguistics in 1865 said that the left side of the brain is responsible for the language encoding and decoding in most people. This leads to the point that, basically, we are capable of doing things before we know they exist. This then leapfrogs to the idea that words we read are not ours, but the world's - this idea seems to be that there is a community pot o' words that generations of humankind dip from. We interact with the pot the same as the early Syrian farmer thousands of years ago who owned the clay tablets.

The chapter ends: “the role of readers is to render visible ? in al-Haytham's fine phrase ? `that which writing suggests in hints and shadows'”. There are at least two ideas here: 1) that encoding something is almost pointless if there is no one to decode it and 2) reading is a crea
 
 

“The Shape of the Book” (pp. 124-147)

Books come in various shapes and sizes. The chapter examines the history of the earliest books to the first machine publishing to paperback publishing of the 20th century. Anomalies, curiosities, and items relating to the size of books are discussed too.

Manguel admits - “I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.” It seems that a lot of people do this and not just Manguel since even the earliest readers wanted books in formats that were in sync with the books' purposes and, indeed, throughout history the most popular book forms have been those that can be easily be held in a person's hand.

Book shapes can be purely about presenting the content such as in the case of the large choir books formatted large enough for several people to see the words from a distance or book shapes can have other purposes such as the heart shaped books and miniatures. Other aspects of the book may also not be so concerned with straight content. Decorative bindings and elaborate drawings and art grace the pages and covers of many books.

On the other hand there are throwaways, ephemeral items such as paperbacks that are created to be used and then thrown away - created for the content to be ingested and then the vessel to be tossed away or what have you. I think Manguel is saying here that the format of the book is used as a channel, but the purpose isn't the same for each book. Sometimes the purpose is decorative and then the channel is highly decorated and tooled and possibly large. Sometimes the purpose is content and then the format will be plain and easily handheld. Other times will be somewhere in between these two cases.

Manguel goes into a quick history of materials used in the creation of “books”: clay, papyrus (plant based and used in scrolls since it is too brittle to be folded), parchment and vellum (animal skins that can be folded and were used to form codexes), paper (folios, quartos and octavos), and finally computers (where we are back to scrolling).

Manguel also goes into a sort of history of printing:

Johann Gutenberg's famous Bibles

1450-1455

Publisher Aldus Manutius

1494-1515

Hornbooks/Prayer Books

16th -19th centuries/18th -19th centuries

Chap-books

17th -18th centuries

Outdoor books

19th Century

Early Paperbacks

19th Century

Modern Paperbacks

Penguin 1935
 
 

Manguel covers several other topics in this chapter too - ranging from reading devices such as “cockfighting chairs” to book storage issues. Yet with all of this incredible diversity covered in this chapter, I think the one key idea is that books aren't just books, they are vessels for information that can be packaged in different physical formats depending on purpose. I think another key concept that relates to our class readings is that humans have, almost from the beginning, needed to record and retrieve information. Even though information formats may be upgraded, the need to engage in this activity is very human and very ancient.
 
 
 
 

Quoted in Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler quoted in Alberto Manguel. “Reading Shadows.” The History of Reading. p 39.