One Argentine Author Pays Homage To Literacy. By Gregory McNamee History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel (Viking Press). Hardcover, $26.95. SAINT AMBROSE, THE reputed author of the Athanasian Creed, did not move his lips when he read. Neither did Ambrose's pupil and colleague, Saint Augustine. The Roman chroniclers who witnessed this feat thought it only a curiosity, and the provincial missionaries' example took generations to become the ruling style of reading in the West. Regardless of how it's done, reading is a social act, involving a history of formal and informal accords establishing that written words have certain meanings and shapes, that they are to be used in certain ways. Reading is also, of course, an intensely individual act: Each reader approaches a text differently, bringing to bear experience and personality on another's words. It's a complex mental activity, involving several areas of the brain at once. Reading is physiologically complex as well, demanding the eyes dart around the page hundreds of times each second to take in bits and pieces of visual information. All of these matters are of profound interest to Alberto Manguel, a multilingual Argentine now living in Canada, who ranges comfortably along the thousands of years that make up the history of literacy. His narrative runs from cave paintings to CD-ROMs, from ancient Chinese "bone-shell scripts" carved on turtle carapaces to technologies not yet in place. His History of Reading spans vast territories of the mind, dropping names and tantalizing arcana; pausing to ponder, in the space of a few paragraphs, the multiple layers of meaning of a medieval illuminated Bible, the double entendres of an advertisement for vodka; and the iconography of Eleanor of Aquitaine's tomb, completed in 1204, which, fittingly enough, depicts her reclined in bed reading a book propped up on her stomach. Manguel's cosmic history of reading as social fact is also a personal one, an affecting memoir of a lifetime surrounded by books--the typical retreat of the lonely child. Less solitary in adulthood, Manguel has had the good fortune of enjoying bookish companions, notably fellow Argentine writer and consummate reader Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read after Borges lost his sight in old age. The infirmity did not, Manguel writes, slow Borges down in the least; "the listener...became the master of the text," pausing for reflection, repeating words and phrases, and calling for other books to illuminate the first. Democratically minded, Manguel joins this story to a portrait of Cuban cigar rollers, who appoint one of their number to read them a story as they work, a long-standing favorite being Alexandre Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, whose name honors a cigar of exceptional quality. Presumably these workers are happier and better adjusted than are their Muzak-fed counterparts, for elsewhere Manguel examines favorably psychologist James Hillman's notion that readers of stories, especially those used to reading early in life, have better psychic armor and a better developed sense of the world than those introduced to stories late or not at all. Manguel darts about from century to century and topic to topic, from the contents of Lady Murasaki's pillow box to famous forgers of the Napoleonic era. But he returns often to several themes, foremost the idea that knowledge--bookish knowledge--is a form of power. Recalling his homeland, Manguel notes that for this very reason most governments do not go out of their way to educate their citizens to be close, critical readers. "Demotic regimes demand that we forget," he writes, "and therefore they brand books as superfluous luxuries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they ban and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid and that we accept our degradation meekly, and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap." You have only to consider the current bestseller lists to recognize Manguel has a point. Political power is ever present in Manguel's discussion: He notes that ancient Alexandria came to have its great library because the ships that passed through its port were required to surrender any books on board to be copied. He considers the laws of ancient Rome--and of the antebellum American South--forbidding slaves to read or be taught how to do so, and remarks that the Pinochet government banned Don Quixote from Chile in 1981, years after it came to power, because this most bookish of novels values individual worth over the state. Sometimes his examples are captivating, such as his anecdote about the long-ago Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdel Kassem Ismael, who ordered his library of 117,000 volumes accompany him while traveling, borne by a caravan of 400 camels--camels that, for good measure, were arranged in alphabetical order. At other times they're horrifying, such as his brief account of the life of the martyr William Tyndale: a printer who, in the unenlightened era of 1536, was strangled and burned at the stake on orders of Henry VIII. His heretical crime was ostensibly printing a new translation of the Bible, but really he gave his life for having criticized the king for divorcing Catherine of Aragon. Tyndale died, Manguel notes, but the words he coined in his Bible live on, among them "peacemaker" and "beautiful." "Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function," Manguel ventures. Gently dispelling the refrain that reading is a dying art--and this in a time when the mass production of books continues to rise--his rich book honors the magic of literacy.

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