Book lovers should not only admire Alberto Manguel but envy him. In the grounds of an old presbytery, just south of the Loire, he has built himself not the usual swimming pool but something far more impressive: a private library.

During the day, it is merely his workplace. At night, however, it becomes a space where he can read “with a lightness verging on insouciance”, the library itself directing his imagination. It even has a garden where he sits with friends under the stars and the sophora trees (a species also known as the Scholar Tree), concocting books that have never been written and imagining the pleasures of an infinite library.

It is a beguiling picture of an ideal literary lifestyle. Bibliophiles without their own particular libraries in the Loire can at least possess this splendidly idiosyncratic history of libraries. The book itself is unusually handsome (as a volume on this subject really has to be), with rich, creamy paper and elegant typefaces. It is also brilliantly and copiously illustrated.

Inside the book, Manguel flits with easy erudition from the collections of Assyrian monarchs and Moorish scholars to those of the ruthless philanthropist Alexander Carnegie and the mad German collector Aby Warburg, who constantly rearranged his books as if they were words in some vast poetic composition. Chapters explore the roles that libraries play in culture: as Myth, as Order, as Power and as Space, for example. Manguel is thoughtful and unpretentious. His particular skill, however, is to turn an epigram, a quotation or an anecdote into something more profound. He traces how his German-published Jewish prayer book survived the literary holocaust that preceded the greater, human one. He tells the story of the eight-book library created, against all the odds, in Auschwitz. He remembers how his mentor, Jorge Luis Borges, blind with age and excessive reading, would have his disciples read to him aloud from well-thumbed encyclopedias.

Borges is a powerful presence in this book, and you might expect someone haunted by such a ghost to write fascinatingly about the Babel-like ambitions of the “World Wide Web”. Manguel might have likened the screen illuminating his library to a perilous portal through which the browser - a true bibliophile's word - passes at his own risk. He could have drawn on a weirdly prescient short story where Borges imagines an “Aleph”, a miraculous lens through which the world can be viewed as if it was an infinite encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, Manguel's thoughts on the web are limited to complaints about how it exists in “the nightmare of a constant present” and how it eradicates the differences between texts. He predicts the success of Google's controversial Library Project (which aims to make all books instantly available online at the “mere” tap of a finger) but recoils from the megalomania of such a scheme.

Like many book lovers, Manguel is not comfortable in the virtual world. He prefers the sensuousness and comforting presence of real books and real libraries. Yes, book collections can be burnt, like those of ancient Alexandria or Nazi Germany. They can be looted and broken up, like those of modern Baghdad. But for Manguel, they are a symbol of resilience all the same. His own library in the Loire offers nothing less than the consolation of order in a chaotic universe.

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Yale £18.99 pp373

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