The Rylands Lecture

Join us for the first annual The Rylands Lecture delivered by Alberto Manguel director of the Espaço Atlântida, in Lisbon, Portugal. Home to over 40,000 titles selected by Manguel, the institution is more than a library it is a centre for the study of the history of reading.

Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-Canadian writer and essayist. From 2016 to 2018 he was director of the National Library of Argentina.

This inaugural The Rylands Lecture celebrates 125 years of the John Rylands Library which opened to the public on 1 January 1900.

This event is free and will be held in the John Rylands Library Event Space, which is accessible for all visitors.

Full information about access is on the Accessable website.

Manguel is the ideal person to deliver this first Rylands Lecture. In his Preface to Stella Halkyard’s Library Lives: a constellation of books and objects from the Rylands, he wrote what could be a description of his own scholarly and imaginative journey. ‘The world comes to us in fragments and, by means of our uncanny narrative eye, we give those fragments the coherence of a story. Likewise, a library or an archive, made of textual bits and pieces, requires a beholder to lend it some (albeit arbitrary) sense.’

He is an extraordinary modern men of letters. He is known for many things: as one of the blind writer/librarian Jorge Luis Borges’s readers from 1964 to 1968, his eventual successor as director of the National Library of Argentina; as a novelist, essayist, translator, anthologist, editor. He is polyglot, writing, speaking and reading in Spanish, English, German, French, and also Portuguese and Italian. He has lived all over the world, since 2021 in Lisbon where he directs the international centre for reading studies.

Among his wonderful books – apart from fiction and essays – are his Dictionary of Imaginary Places (a collaboration with Giani Guadalupi – a guide for travellers to fantasy lands, islands and other places in world literature – Ruritania, Shangri-La, Xanadu, Oz, Wonderland, Narnia etc), A History of Reading, The Library by Night, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: a biography. Most of his books were written in English. One of his forthcoming books, The Reverse Side of the Tapestry, with his own illustrations, will appear ten months from now from Carcanet and the typescript and illustrations will become part of the Rylands archive collection.

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Host or Publisher John Rylands Research Institute and Library