Alberto Manguel on his favourite libraries and bookstores
Alberto Manguel\xa0is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor, and the author of \xa0many books of both non-fiction, including\xa0\xa0A History of Reading\xa0(1996),\xa0The Library at Night\xa0(2007) and\xa0Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography\xa0(2008); and fiction (\xa0News From a Foreign Country Came\xa0, 1991).\xa0We met at the Kingston WritersFest; I asked him to recount some of his favourite experiences in bookstores and libraries around the world.
First he pointed out that libraries and bookstores, in spite of their being public places, are really private spaces that each reader makes his or her own home: a sort of autobiography, where the books that interest you contain words that mirror your own experience. \xa0We talk about a Tel Aviv bookstore he visited 60 years ago, bookshop stickers, the\xa0reconstructed library of Aby Warburg\xa0in Hamburg, and treasures found by chance in used bookstores on Avenida\xa0Corrientes in Buenos Aires. Manguel's novel\xa0A Return, sketches the character of one of the old booksellers on this street.
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