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Books|Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Antilibrary: The Hidden Value of Unread Books

The legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco had over 50,000 books in his private library.

When asked why so many, he had this to say:

It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

It just requires a little reframing to think about books differently. What if we thought about them as medicine? Then, suddenly:

we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

Upon seeing my library of over 5,000 books a friend of mine commented: “you’ll never read all of these.” And they’re right. But the point is not to read all of them. Good books are anything but a commodity. Having a library full of them is, in many ways, wealth.

There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

Umberto Eco

In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb adds to the point:

The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

A little later, Taleb writes:

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head.

A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point.

My library serves as a daily reminder of what I don’t know.

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