As I said above, I am a collector. My music collection is now all digital, but I still buy and archive books. While I am assiduous about sorting them by category, at this point most of them go unread. So I was thrilled to find this essay by Maria Popova. She posits that keeping books within reach but still unread provides the setting for a special relationship with knowledge. She cites scholar, statistician, and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb's reference to the Italian writer Umberto Eco’s uncommon relationship with books and reading:
"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 do not 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 menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
Essay: Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones
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