Old as writing, the library is an insti­tution and an archetype. Its symbolic dimensions embody the contradictions of civilization: It’s a token of authority that threatens to undermine regnant powers, a figure of memory and forgetting, an object of longing and loathing. With its promise of comprehensive wisdom, it forever reminds us of the incompleteness of our knowledge, the limits of our vision. But it’s also a physical ­place—­a home for books and a workshop for those who read and care for them.

Like the world itself, the library dichotomizes. Books are included or excluded; they are free for all or reserved for the select few; some enjoy attention and acclaim, while others lie shrouded in ­obscurity—­just as after nightfall, light falls on open volumes while other pages remain in darkness. In Alberto Manguel’s evocative formulation, it’s this last either­/or—­the turning of day into ­night—­that reveals the library’s tensions. And he recalls Virginia Woolf’s useful distinction between two types of readers, the scholarly and the casual. While the former, Woolf tells us, “searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart,” the latter eschews the impulse to read systematically, which “is very apt to kill . . . the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.” What to Woolf is a matter of taxonomy, however, for Manguel is a question of diurnal rhythm. “During the day,” he writes, “the concentration and system tempt me; at night I can read with a lightheartedness verging on insouciance.” When night falls, amid pools of lamplight and glittering books his library in France seems to float like a ship on the sea; it becomes “a universe of ­self-­serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.”

 is a sentimental history. That earlier book introduced a wide circle of readers to the revelation, previously appreciated only by historians of the book, that reading has not been the same thing in all times and places, but that its textures change with alterations to culture and the nature of the individual consciousness as much as with changes in the media of writing and publishing. In The Library at Night, Manguel’s point is a different, nearly opposite one: All libraries partake of the same dream of completeness. Behind and beyond each collection of books is an ideal, shimmering and unrealizable, which haunts the sensitive reader.

Ranging through history and mythology, Manguel searches for the library’s avatars. “The Tower of Babel collapsed in the prehistory of storytelling,” he writes; “the Library of Alexandria rose when stories took on the shape of books, and strove to find a syntax that would lend each word, each tablet, each scroll its illuminating and necessary place.” That syntax, the ordering of books on the shelves, is a dynamic to which Manguel is drawn throughout a book whose chapters take the form of meditations on a series of similes: “The Library as Shadow,” “The Library as Chance,” “The Library as Oblivion.” Again and again, Manguel’s imagination returns to the labor and compulsion of putting books together and making them talk to one another. In the ordering of books, Manguel senses a tension that lies at the heart not only of ­library ­making but of the project of civilization itself. Although the universe we live in may be characterized by a “dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose,” we build and arrange collections of books as if they could represent a universal order, or will one into being as if by sympathetic ­magic.

The powers and tensions of the library as symbol have played havoc with our understanding of libraries as institutions. For libraries are not one and the same thing across cultures, in all times and places. A private book collection is a very different thing from a public library, speaking to different orderings of power and privilege, access and understanding. A research library, likewise, differs fundamentally from an ecclesiastical one, despite their historical ties. A public library in Nazi Germany or the American South under Jim Crow differs in crucial ways from midwestern Carnegie libraries or the great urban public libraries of Boston, New York, and Chicago. Libraries aren't always used for the purpose of opening minds; those that exclude certain kinds of books and readers can be instruments of oppression and alienation.

Manguel, however, is less interested in the politics of library history than he is in its poetry. His historicity is of a distinctly literary cast: allusive, ­magpie­like, unafraid of anachronism and Whiggish teleology. The 

 is larded with fascinating figures, telling anecdotes, and library lore. Michelangelo and Melvil Dewey, Antonio Panizzi and Sextus Propertius, George Orwell and Caliph Omar I all make appearances. Manguel writes evocatively of libraries that sprang up at the intersection of ancient trading routes, such as Chinguetti in Mauri­tania, which over the centuries became a trove of collections devoted to the learning of Islamic poets, scholars, and scientists; and Dunhuang on the Silk Road, where works from China, Tibet, and India mingled with treasured texts of Persia and the Hellenic world. Elsewhere, he tells of 17th-­century Iceland, where the people, impoverished by their long, cruel vassalage under Denmark, ransacked the libraries to supply themselves with paper and vellum for insulation and clothing. In 1702, King Frederick IV of Denmark had the remnants of the destroyed books exhaustively retrieved, reassembled, and shipped back to ­Copenhagen—­where, less than 30 years later, they were destroyed in a ­fire.

There are odd errors here and there. At one point, Manguel asserts that the Internet makes banned books accessible to readers in Rhodesia (it became Zimbabwe in 1980). Elsewhere, he reports that Google has aban­doned its controversial project to digitize the world’s books with the cooperation of numerous university and public libraries; in fact, the pro­gram continues to grow. This last error is telling, for it betrays Manguel’s reluctance to see the Internet as the ­epoch-­making phenomenon that it ­is.

The physical collections to which Manguel devotes his book bear the traces of their makers and readers, intrinsic markers of ownership and experience. Such traces are harder to discern on the Web, where books talk to one another of their own accord as their owners and readers scan them, tag them, annotate and hyperlink and mash them up, and blog about them. Not only Google and Amazon.com, but the Open Content Alliance (a group of libraries that have opted to digitize materials without Google), LibraryThing (a site where members make and share their personal electronic book catalogs), Project Guten­berg (a large collection of free electronic books), and a host of other initiatives ensure that books will enjoy a rich life in the digital age. The ongoing digitization of books promises an apotheosis of sorts, as the world’s printed matter merges into One Big Book, an encyclopedic vade ­mecum.

Networked text is marvelously malleable stuff, and its ease of manipulation grants greater scope for invention and expression. Using the Internet, we’re able to build vast personal libraries. They may lack the savor and heft of physical libraries, but they enrich and complicate the world of texts as a whole. On the Web, we’re able to register the shifts in direction our sensibility takes as we move from book to book, and we find and delight in the traces of migrations undertaken by others. Far from supplanting or destroying the kind of library Manguel values most ­highly—­a private library that tastes of the ­universe—­the Internet makes possible a multiverse of reading, knowing ­worlds.

But Manguel can be forgiven if he underestimates the value and beauty of the Internet. The strength of his book doesn't lie in scholarship and analysis, but in humane meditation. Like Montaigne, who had a ­tower-­ensconced library of his own, Manguel revels in the possibilities of the word “essay.” His chapters are tries, trials, takes. Reaching into the vast store of books in his shadowed memory, he pulls down volume after volume, trying the weight and feel of one against the other. The success of 

 rests largely on Manguel’s own fulfillment of a trope familiar from antiquity: the human mind as library. 

 is the product of a mind made by reading, and the realization of its own essential argument: The library is a mirror in which we find ourselves and our world reflecting and interpenetrating.

 is senior editor at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and author of 

by Alberto Manguel, Yale University Press, 2007. 

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Matthew Battles examines Alberto Manguel's rumination about libraries, the “product of a mind made by reading.”

Reading in the Dark

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, many Americans saw no place for art in their new nation. The country lacked professional art academies, patrons who commissioned work for palaces and cathedrals, and the leisure to appreciate art. In fact, however, this new land presented painters and sculptors with a host of opportunities. Wealthy colonists wanted their portraits limned; they lined their studies with paintings and ornaments. And, as Hugh Howard shows in 

, ­post-­colonial America’s political culture called on a generation of artists to develop new means of representing history, power, and ­achievement.

The painter’s chair of Howard’s title is no mere stool or Windsor armchair, but a technical ­apparatus—­a seat on gimbal and ­screw—­that permitted the artist to revolve a sitter without altering his pose as the light changed throughout the day. George Washington became intimately familiar with the chairs of many artists. By Howard’s count, Washington sat for at least 28 painters, several of them on numerous occasions. The resulting portraits were endlessly reproduced. Despite his frequent expressions of impatience, Washington keenly understood the manifold purposes of the visual arts in his ­time—­to provide a record of people and events, mementos of loved ones, and the images that helped form public discourse and popular mythology.

Whether Washington was sitting for artists or presiding over the Constitutional Convention, his impassive countenance belied a sensitive apprehension of events. One of How­ard’s most delightful scenes, in which Wash­ington lies on a large table at Mount Vernon breathing through quills in his nostrils while the sculptor ­Jean-­Antoine Houdon trowels his face with warm plaster, is described by the subject himself. The first president recorded the procedure in his journal with plainspoken precision, noting that the process began with pieces of gypsum broken into lumps “the size of a pullets egg,” and that the plaster was ready to apply to his face when “made as thick as Loblolly or very thick cream.”

Howard, who has written extensively about the Founding Fathers’ attitudes toward architecture, has produced in 

 a serious work of art history. Alternating Washington’s turns in the chair with episodes in the lives of painters such as John Trumbull and Gilbert Stuart, he shows us how the course of human events in the young nation helped to break new ground in ­image-­making as well. Paintings that might appear stodgy and stale to the modern eye were innovative in their time. By depicting General James Wolfe’s death in the 1759 Battle of Quebec in a realist style, for instance, showing soldiers and officers in contemporary dress rather than classical attire, Benjamin West broke with convention and caused a sensation in London. That painting paved the way for West’s pupil John Trumbull to depict the signers of the Declaration of Independence in the same fashion. But Trumbull’s painting took innovation a step further, Howard argues, by treating the signing of a document as an occasion as momentous as a battle. Trumbull’s work cast the Enlightenment occupation of political thinking in heroic mode. “Although it records a legislative moment rather than a military confrontation,” Howard writes of the painting that bears the name of this founding docu­ment, “

 would ring out over the centuries louder than a cannon shot.”

Howard’s story turns melancholy after Washington’s death, as the next generation of artists contends with the deepening complexities of life in the new Republic. Rembrandt Peale, troubled son of the Revolutionary War figure and portraitist Charles Peale, painted the elderly Washington in 1795 as a fragile paterfamilias. Many years later, the younger Peale produced another portrait of the father of the country. In 

, which hangs in the U.S. Capitol, we see a vigorous Wash­ing­ton framed in a heavy stone porthole festooned with graven oak leaves and the head of Jupiter. Peale had returned to the classicism eschewed by his father’s gener­ation, but it’s a twisted classicism, bathed in shadows and crepuscular light. The painting glowers with romantic intensity. Between us and glory stands history, cold and immobile as stone. It’s as if we’re looking through the oculus of a ­mausoleum—­yet it’s impossible to tell whether the tomb is Washington’s or our own.

 writes regularly for the Ideas section of The

and is at work on a book about the history of writing.

The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art

 by Hugh Howard, Bloomsbury, 297 pp, 2009.