Dana Hansen

No one could successfully accuse Alberto Manguel of linear thinking on the subject of books and their history. In my very brief correspondence in 2010 with the Argentinian-born Canadian writer, editor, translator, and now director of the National Library of Argentina, even he had to admit to “the serpentine ways” of his thinking, which at times he felt “wanders a little too aimlessly.” For admirers of Manguel’s…

In his new book, Curiosity, Alberto Manguel explores, through the prism of his own experience and those of perennial favourites such as Dante, Plato and Montaigne, the privileged life of the thinker and the very human impulse to repeatedly ask the imaginative question “Why?” He writes, “curiosity is a means of declaring our allegiance to the human fold” and “seldom rewarded with meaningful or satisfying…

As many university students majoring in English literature do, I worked in bookstores for a number of years, first at the chains and later in an exceptional and still-thriving independent shop in Burlington, Ontario. Despite the fact that David Mason, one of Canada’s foremost antiquarian booksellers and now author of The Pope’s Bookbinder: A …

Provocative questions in articles such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Nicholas Carr in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic) and “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” (Stephen Marche in the May 2012 issue of The Atlantic) ask us to consider the potential hazards of a wholesale adoption of such technologies without attempting to understand their impact on our…

It is fitting that quotations taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books should be a connecting thread prefacing each work in Alberto Manguel’s new collection of essays, A Reader on Reading, an assembly of pieces previously published in Geist, TLS and elsewhere that explores Manguel’s passion for the printed…