As butterfly inside a library

Abstract

Abstract: Ever since I was a child, books surrounded me. My father was a teacher and had a library at home that guided me to read – it contained newspapers, magazines, comics and books.  As the Portuguese poet, Manuel Alegre argued, "there is no arrow that has not bent with the bow of childhood."For more than fifty years, I have been hoarding books and building up a library of my own over the course of two marriages, retirement, donations, a new job and temporary housing. In addition to the fact that access to books is precarious, the library I have assembled has an under-threat future. In "June 1968", Borges remarked that "to order libraries is to exercise, silently and modestly, the art of criticism", this is what I have tried to do since I had the means. Although I never catalogued my books, while classifying did it precariously. Despite apparent and dusty chaos, I rarely get lost among the printed texts. Maintaining an uneven library has always been compatible with my personality, which is like the flight of a butterfly. Jumping from book to book and from one subject to another. As Montaigne, Fourier, and Bourdieu suggested, that's how I have been, and how I work up to this day. This chapter aims to explain the development and collection of this library, as well as its utilization.

Keywords: uneven library, Borges, to classify, to order, utilization.