Libraries of the Mind

by William Marx

Overview

How we build our invisible libraries

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.

Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691273884
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Series:	The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities/Princeton University Press Lectures in European Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This elegant and thought-provoking rumination on libraries pays tribute to literature that has been lost—or that was never written in the first place. The result is a sustained meditation on absence. At the same time, Marx skillfully conjures, from the fragments that have survived, rich imaginary libraries. This is literary criticism in the tradition of Borges and Calvino.”—Martin Puchner, author of Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop

“In Libraries of the Mind, the outstanding French literary critic and historian William Marx reflects on the collections of literary works that tradition, education, and individual lovers of literature keep together within invisible libraries. As repositories of cultural memory, these libraries also hint at what Marx provocatively calls the ‘dark matter’ of lost or forgotten works, e.g., the large number of unavailable yet tantalizing Ancient Greek tragedies. Marx wisely advises us to treasure the countless works that fill up our present-day invisible libraries thanks to modern technology. An eye-opening, fascinating book.”—Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago

Editorial Reviews

2025-02-01
Renew that library card.

This deftly written book reflects on the history of how we organize knowledge, classify books, and give meaning to our lives through reading. Marx, a professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France, traces the development of libraries from antiquity to the present. He illustrates how all acts of cataloging are really acts of interpretation—that is, what you place from first to last tells us about what you think is important. The Dewey Decimal Classification, for example, runs from computers, information, and general works (the 000s) to history (the 900s), in essence taking us from the abstract to the concrete. European and Asian libraries catalog things differently, sometimes focusing on years of acquisition or even the size of books. Libraries establish canons: collections of authors and writings that matter to a culture. And we, too, in our own lives, make such catalogs and canons. Marx argues that we all create libraries of the mind. We look back and remember the books we’ve read and, in the process, shape a view of the world. Recent developments in digital literacy also work in this way. Marx provocatively asks us to think of Wikipedia less as an encyclopedia than as a library. How it links its entries together, how it offers additional external references, and how it organizes its articles into groups all say something important about how the Wikipedia project is a conception of not just what to know but how to know. Marx’s purview takes us from the ancient Greeks to modern Europe, from Asia to South America. In the end, he argues for the enduring value of imaginative literature in all societies. His lesson: “True engagement with literature demands humility, openness, and a readiness to be transformed by the unknown.”

An eloquent plea for reading by a true scholar of world literature.

Kirkus Reviews