Tag: antilibrary

Replied to My Library of Unread Books by Patrick RhonePatrick Rhone (patrickrhone.net)

“A library of mostly unread books is far more inspiring than a library of books already read. There’s nothing more exciting than finishing a book, and walking over to your shelves to figure out what you’re going to read next.”

— Gabe Habash

Here’s an incomplete sampling of mine (and many of these have books behind them)…

This reminds me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of an antilibrary. It’s always nice to have some social validation for our tsundoku and issues with bibliomania.

👓 Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones l Brainpickings

Read Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones (BrainPickings)
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
Annotated The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas TalebNassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House)
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows 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 menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.