Alberto Manguel Quotes

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.

In design-speak, 'a library' means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that's all you have room for.

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.

It sounds like a brag but I've got a separate room in my flat just for unread books; I don't let my read books touch my unread books.

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge entertainment comfort even sanity but as a kind of artful decoration.

I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

I have my library separate from the family home, and every room is a different genre. The only room that I can guarantee I've read everything is the horror room.

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

His books are kept on freestanding shelves hung at different angles on a sea-green wall. They defy gravity, as good books should.

It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

When I receive a box of my books, my impulse is to hide rather than display them. It always makes me very anxious that they send so many copies, because I have to think of lots of different places to hide them.

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves.