Editorial

Why was I so affected (see News and Notes below) by the story of the beetle infestation of the millennium-old Hungarian Pannonhalma Archabbey? It has something to do with the way in which the sudden disturbance in the permanency of a library affects the stability of the librarian and the readers themselves.

When at the start of this century I moved apartments in Manchester, the men from Pickford’s sized up my meagre furnishings and gave me an estimate. It was so reasonable that I drew to their attention the book-lined walls.

‘All that’s to come with us.’

‘That’s fine,’ they said. ‘We’ve taken it into account.’

In the end there were fifty-seven cases of books to be moved two streets, from a fourth-floor flat in Granby Row to a fourth-floor flat on Sackville Street. The movers had not factored in how much books weigh, how much space the flat little rectangles multiplied a few thousand times fill. To make matters worse, early in the move the Sackville Street lift failed. Moving furniture was a doddle but the books were worse than any albatross.

When Walter Benjamin moved house in 1931, he wrote his essay ‘Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting’. Alberto Manguel recalls,

he used the occasion of pulling his almost two thousand books out of their boxes to muse on the privileges and responsibilities of a reader. Benjamin was moving from the house he had shared with his wife until their acrimonious divorce the previous year to a small furnished apartment in which he would live alone, he said, for the first time in his life, ‘like an adult’. Benjamin was then ‘at the threshold of forty and without property, position, home or assets’. It might not be entirely mistaken to see his meditation on books as a counterpoise to the breakup of his marriage.

Manguel himself wrote a compelling book entitled Packing My Library, published by Yale in 2018. Having lived for a decade and a half in a medieval stone presbytery in the South of France with his partner, and a library of 35,000 books housed in a converted barn, he was obliged to move. Packing his books was a creative trauma for ‘the world’s foremost melancholic bibliophile’. His library was a kind of autobiography and its packing away ‘something of a self-obituary’.

After twenty-five years in our Victorian offices, Carcanet Press and PN Review were bombed out of the first home in the Corn Exchange, Manchester (1996). After a few years’ looking for a new home with our dusty, damaged books in rescue boxes, we washed up in Cross Street. Twenty-seven years on, we were driven to relocate – for ever, it is to be hoped – to our present location in Manchester University Library. The removal agents this time were experienced book movers and the transition was meticulously organised. They tucked the spine-out books and the material that had been tucked behind them (duplicates, forgotten titles, Christmas cards, bus tickets) among the ‘public’ books, waking up a vast fossil-life.

The one unexpected circumstance of the move was that the shelving in the renovated offices had not been completed. For almost a year after the move, our books were stored on dozens of two-sided library trolleys. Our collection within the University library was in creative disorder for months, neither chaos (because some of the books retained an alphabetical sequence), nor cosmos (because there was no predictable sequence to the trolleys). We were continually confronted with titles produced half a century ago, mingling with new books, and with the fossil material which recalled departed colleagues, authors and forgotten species. Even a few shards of glass from the bombed-out Corn Exchange.

We were driven back on our electronic resources, the files of PDFs of our titles becoming our major textual resource. The books grew less relevant as time passed: the apotheosis of remote working, estranged and even alienated from the very products we were selling into the world. The trolleyed library weighs tonnes, but it could be virtually stored and shared on laptops where dust did not gather or thieves break in and steal.

PN Review’s physical world has now righted itself. New shelves again groan under weight of paper. Things hide behind the magazines and books and arrange for our heirs their eventual surprises. A new form of memory is being generated, an alphabetised chronology drawing on at least three long-term stable periods, each disrupted by events beyond our control. Every change ends in discovery and rediscovery. History is differently inflected. Yards of books by MacDiarmid, Ashbery, Morgan, Jennings, Sisson, Davie, Ford, Graves, Laura Riding extend, but they look different now, spaced out, becoming antique. PN Review manifests in all its phases, from the six demi-octavo hardback ‘magazines’ with which we began to the quarterly and six-times-yearly A4 paperbacks. 290 items, almost a complete set. Or if we count this issue, 291… The question is, how hungry are the beetles in Pannonhalma Archabbey, and are they travelling north?