The Library of Babel (or, How Bats Rescue Books) 🦇 | Book Review
Review of Martin Latham's magpie-minded and engaging The Bookseller's Tale.
In 1730, the English Gothic novelist William Beckford visited the legendary Mafra Palace Library in Portugal. My reader might have seen this library on instagram reels and other lists of ‘the most beautiful places to visit’ or ‘the most beautiful libraries ever built’.
Beckford, however, thought Marfa Library to be 'clumsily designed with a gallery which projects into the room in a very awkward manner'1
He should have stayed quiet when it came to discussing architecture since he himself built an insanely tall tower on his house located near Bath, which collapsed three times within a few years of its construction.
If Beckford had stayed there overnight, the secret of the upper gallery would have become clear as hundreds of tiny bats swarmed from their roosting places behind the upper cases to eat insects which might threaten the books.
Small portals allowed them to fly around nearby orchards.
Interestingly enough, as Martin Latham points out in his brilliant The Bookseller’s Tale, booklice are not as evil as we tend to portray them. They only destroy books that are not being read. Thus pointing to us which ones we ignore for a long time.
The stories from Martin Latham's personal journey as a bookseller are equally captivating to read. In the early 00’s, he contacted the publisher of Umberto Eco in the UK to invite him to an event in his store. The publisher responded that Eco never commits to such events. Latham didn’t give up and called Eco’s publisher in Milan and received a reply from the author himself.
Eco said that what he really wanted to do was to work in a bookshop, at least for a day. He did, and even sold one of his books to a customer, without revealing his identity.
When I read this story I got a strong wish to see the face of that customer when they finally found out that they bought the book from the great Umberto Eco himself!
However, the most thrilling tale from Latham's 35-year career as the manager of the Waterstones bookstore in Canterbury unfolded when he unearthed a Roman bathhouse floor beneath the philosophy section of his bookshop.
A large plinth near the Philosophy section indicated, the chief archaeologist told me, the presence of a devotional statue; my bookshop, too, had perhaps been a temple-library like a mini-Pergamum.
A perennial damp patch on the back staircase from the basement indicated the spring possibly a sacred one as at nearby Lullingstone, which may have attracted the Romans to the site.
Before we used to go to churches to find spiritual nourishment, but now that we've abandoned them, bookshops serve as our contemporary spiritual sanctuaries. We choose to go to bookshops when we need a space to escape, to spiritually regenerate, and to feel that life is bigger, greater and wider than our daily routine.
