LIBRARIES OF THE MIND

Renew that library card.

This deftly written book reflects on the history of how we organize knowledge, classify books, and give meaning to our lives through reading. Marx, a professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France, traces the development of libraries from antiquity to the present. He illustrates how all acts of cataloging are really acts of interpretation—that is, what you place from first to last tells us about what you think is important. The Dewey Decimal Classification, for example, runs from computers, information, and general works (the 000s) to history (the 900s), in essence taking us from the abstract to the concrete. European and Asian libraries catalog things differently, sometimes focusing on years of acquisition or even the size of books. Libraries establish canons: collections of authors and writings that matter to a culture. And we, too, in our own lives, make such catalogs and canons. Marx argues that we all create libraries of the mind. We look back and remember the books we’ve read and, in the process, shape a view of the world. Recent developments in digital literacy also work in this way. Marx provocatively asks us to think of Wikipedia less as an encyclopedia than as a library. How it links its entries together, how it offers additional external references, and how it organizes its articles into groups all say something important about how the Wikipedia project is a conception of not just what to know but how to know. Marx’s purview takes us from the ancient Greeks to modern Europe, from Asia to South America. In the end, he argues for the enduring value of imaginative literature in all societies. His lesson: “True engagement with literature demands humility, openness, and a readiness to be transformed by the unknown.”

An eloquent plea for reading by a true scholar of world literature.