Sebastian Shakespeare talks to Alberto Manguel, the Argentine-Canadian anthologist, essayist, novelist, translator and former director of the National Library of Argentina. His works include The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), A History of Reading (1996), With Borges (2004) and The Library at Night (2006).

Sebastian Shakespeare: You donated your library of forty thousand books to the Centre for Research into the History of Reading in Lisbon. How many books does that leave you with?

Alberto Manguel: Fewer than a hundred. As I continue to acquire books, I pass them on to the Centre – or Espaço Atlântida as it is now known. The collection, which currently stands at over fifty thousand, is being housed and catalogued at the Municipal Archives of Lisbon while we wait for the renovation of the building allocated by the City of Lisbon to be finished. The building in question, which is next door to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in central Lisbon, is a beautiful late 18th-century palace with magnificent tilework and frescoes. If the stars are kind, we might inaugurate Espaço Atlântida in 2028 – in time for my eightieth birthday.

How do you arrange them?

When the library was my private