In this “Closed Museum or Hidden Library” are many strange volumes and curious objects

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Manuel The Library at Night closed museum hidden library many strange volumes curious objects

Consider also:

  1. “Reading and its rituals became acts of resistance; as the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto noted, ‘everything could be treated as resistance because everything was prohibited.'”
  2. “The past (the tradition that leads to our electronic present) is, for the Web user, irrelevant, since all that counts is what is currently displayed. Compared to a book that betrays its age in its physical aspect, a text called up on the screen has no history. Electronic space is frontierless. Sites-that is to say, specific, self-defined homelands-are founded on it but neither limit nor possess it, like water on water. The Web is quasi-instantaneous; it occupies no time except the nightmare of a constant present. All surface and no volume, all present and no past, the Web aspires to be (advertises itself as) every user’s home, in which communication is possible with every other user at the speed of thought. That is its main characteristic: speed.”
  3. “Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.”