Magic and Madness in the Library: Protagonists among the Stacks (review)

Magic and Madness in the Library: Protagonists among the Stacks. Edited by Eric Graeber. Delhi, N.Y.: Birch Brook Press. 1999. 160pp. $19.00 (paper); $60.00 (signed cloth). ISBN 0-913559-36-9 (paper); 0-913559-37-7 (cloth).

Libraries have long fascinated both writers and readers, and there is much literature that documents and explores this fascination. Magic and Madness in the Library: Protagonists among the Stacks, an anthology edited by Eric Graeber and published by Birch Brook Press, is perhaps the most recent addition to this body of work. In this collection, Graeber strives to provide readers with a sense of "the variety and range of reactions to libraries filtered through the imagination of the fiction writer over the centuries" (9). To that end, Graeber has included selections from many literary masterpieces, including Don Quixote, Candide, and The House of Mirth. In addition to collecting classics, this volume also includes thematically appropriate selections from contemporary works of literary fiction, such as Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House, as well as examples of popular and genre fiction, including work by Stephen King and mystery writer Donald Olson.

The collection includes novel excerpts, short fiction, as well as work in other genres. It comes as no surprise that one of the best selections in the anthology is the legendary short story "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, who was at one time the director of the National Library of Argentina, is a writer whose work will be familiar to many who are interested in literature about libraries. Beginning with a compelling description of "the universe (which others call the library)" (75), Borges draws readers into what Graeber calls in his introduction a "mathematically constructed library nightmare" (15).

This story stands in stark contrast to the highly romantic vision of the library presented in the final piece in the collection, an extract from Reverend George Crabbe's long narrative poem "The Library," published in 1838. Crabbe's poem opens with the lines

What strange art, what magic can dispose"
The troubled mind to change its native woes?
Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see
Others more wretched, more undone than we?
This BOOKS can do; --nor this alone; they give
New views to life, and teach us how to live;
They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise. (147)

The poem, which Graeber calls a "fitting afterword" to the collection, goes on like this for nearly ten pages.

It is unfortunate that, in some cases, the prose excerpts collected here have been cut too short to provide the reader with a context in which to understand the library being described or imagined. The anthology includes, for example, a very brief extract from Elizabeth McCracken's novel The Giant's House that does little more than describe the physical space of a library with only hints about the librarian/narrator's rich and complicated relationship to the structure, its collection of books, and its users.

Magic and Madness in the Library: Protagonists among the Stacks is an interesting, if uneven, collection spanning many centuries and bringing together work from various genres. Because it collects such a diverse group of thematically related writings from a range of time periods, it is possible that this anthology may be of some use to scholars and library historians. The primary audience of Magic and Madness in the Library, however, will be more general readers who are interested in fictional accounts of real and imagined libraries through time. The book itself is a skillfully made letterpress edition that includes compelling woodcuts by Frank C. Eckmair. A limited cloth edition has been signed by the editor and will be particularly appealing to collectors with an interest in literature of the library and libraries of the imagination.

Nancy Kuhl ,
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

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