
Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015) - Tomte
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/
======
goodjam
"How to talk about books you haven't read" by Pierre Bayard is another
interesting book on this subject. I presume Derrida is not much liked around
here but this excerpt is pure gold from the Derrida documentary
[https://youtu.be/tdumO88JMxw](https://youtu.be/tdumO88JMxw): (Derrida shows
his library to the interviewer) "I haven't read all the books that are here"
"But you've read most of them? "No, no ... three of four... but I've read
those four really, really well."

~~~
artacus
I glad to see someone else appreciated that because being a recovering book
hoarder I've used that line myself quite a few times.

------
riffraff
A small video of Eco walking through his house library, discussed in the
article

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoEuvgT1wBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoEuvgT1wBs)

EDIT:

this is actually an extract from a small 3 part documentary that should be
visible here [http://www.artribune.com/television/2016/02/video-umberto-
ec...](http://www.artribune.com/television/2016/02/video-umberto-eco-sulla-
memoria-una-conversazione-in-tre-parti-biennale-di-venezia-padiglione-italia-
davide-ferrario/)

~~~
jacquesm
I've seen bookstores with substantially fewer books than that. Incredible.

------
gooseus
This is an article discussing one of the first chapters of The Black Swan by
Nassim Nicolas Taleb. I thought it was a great part of a great book that
really changed how I think about the world.

If you'd prefer to just read the actual chapters, it starts on page 33:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.695...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.695.4305&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

For those interested in expanding their (anti-)library:

[https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-
Frag...](https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-
Fragility/dp/081297381X)

------
theptip
Finally, a good erudite excuse for all the fascinating(-looking) books that
keep accumulating, faster than I can read them.

~~~
tjr
If you call your collection of unread books your "anti-library", what do you
call your collection of books still enclosed within postal delivery boxes that
you haven't even opened yet?

~~~
simonh
When I was a CS student we used to joke that a friend of ours organized his
room in the form of a novel data structure, a bit like a heap but
unstructured, called a tip[0]. It would be perfect for storing unopened mail.

[0][https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/rubbish...](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/rubbish-
tip)

~~~
zumatic
A tip is essentially an LRU cache:

[https://www.ft.com/content/e6f82da0-8b4d-11e6-8cb7-e7ada1d12...](https://www.ft.com/content/e6f82da0-8b4d-11e6-8cb7-e7ada1d123b1)

(I first heard about this concept ages ago, but that's the first article on
Google; sorry if paywalled).

------
failrate
I have the equivalent, but in the far more economical form of browser tabs and
bookmarks that I will never read.

~~~
crystalPalace
Glad I'm not the only one with 300+ tabs open. Hacker News really does not
help with its constant barrage of interesting and often long form articles
that I may not have time to read when I first encounter them.

~~~
fosco
I have the same,

I wish there was a text-to-speech tool that did not sound like a robot so I
could listen to articles on commutes and other opportunities while not in
front of a computer.

~~~
failrate
I wonder if the recent experiments with deep learning on spoken audio can be
combined with text to speech to create more natural sounding output.

------
tristanho
Love this concept; read it once in Black Swan and it's kind of been stuck in
my head ever since. Everyone has an antilibrary of books, so much so that I
think the most common response I ever hear to "have you read X?" is "no, but
it's on my list!" Everyone who reads has an antilibrary, whether they know it
or not.

Slightly off-topic, but are there any self-proclaimed "power readers" out
there who would be interested in technology that improves the practice of
reading? (I get super excited whenever reading is mentioned on HN) Taleb is
one of my favorites, and I know from his writing that he would be offended by
the idea of "reading technology", but I personally believe that reading is one
of the best things we can do for ourselves yet the practice hasn't evolved for
millennia. As such, I've been experimenting _a lot_ with how software can
improve the practice of reading. If that sounds interesting to you at all, I'd
love to chat! I'm me@tristanhomsi.com

~~~
hoodwink
My antilibrary is in the form of Kindle samples. Every time I come across a
title that interests me, I send myself a free sample. Whenever I'm in need of
a new book to read, I browse my samples and sample them until one captures my
interest. It leaves much to be desired, but it does curb my tsundoku.

------
kjdal2001
I personally just got around to accepting my antilibrary as a good/ok thing to
have. In the past I would refrain from buying new books if I still had some
unread ones on my shelf. But it now seems to me that it was a greater waste to
squander what curiosity I had in the moment than the money spent on unread
books. So my pile of unread books in my apartment has grown, but they aren't
really wasted. Maybe some time ill get around to reading them. But until then
they sit there as a constant reminder of all the things I found interesting
enough to look into over the course of my life.

------
xherberta
This featured an illustration from Eco's "The Three Astronauts", a children's
book in which an American, a Russian, and a Chinese walk into a semiotic space
rocket...

Turns out they're making it into a 21st century opera...
[http://www.thethreeastronauts.com/](http://www.thethreeastronauts.com/)

Enjoy the illustrations: [https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/15/the-three-
astronaut...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/15/the-three-astronauts-
umberto-eco/)

------
paulpauper
anything involving Taleb should be taken with a lump of salt

OK let's assume Wikipedia is the equivalent of a giant library of unread
books. I don't feel any smarter, nor am I am becoming smarter by not reading
it. Buying a bunch of books one is never going to read seems like a waste of
money. You cant actually learn anything until you read at least some of
it..maybe missing the point

~~~
prestonbriggs
When I buy books, I intend to read them; I expect Eco does too. I think the
point is the library of as-yet-unread books is more interesting than the
library of already-read books. And it differs from Wikipedia or the Amazon
catalog; it's a collection of books that interested me enough to lay out money
and shelf space to have nearby.

~~~
09bjb
Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're
going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally viable
and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need.

I also appreciated all the oblique suggestions that our appreciation of what
we don't know, and how we should temper our certitude, should INCREASE with
greater knowledge. Way too many PhD types out there stomping on people with
their expansive knowledge when they should know better than most the degree to
which they're in the dark.

~~~
paganel
> Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're
> going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally
> viable and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need.

I definitely buy books that I don't intend to read "immediately", in fact I
have books which I've bought 3-4 years ago, of which I think about every 2-3
months, but which I've not yet had the time to read. I definitely do not have
10X the money that I need, even though I agree that books are one of my few
guilty pleasures (I oftentimes think that I was born in order to read books).

I also like to sit on my couch and look at my bookshelves, it gives me a
really pleasant feeling. I do that every 2-3 days. I like books.

~~~
lukas099
(1) "I definitely buy books that I don't intend to read 'immediately'"

(2) "I definitely do not have 10X the money that I need"

Perhaps if you didn't do (1) (and similar behavior), you _would_ have 10x the
money you need.

~~~
paganel
I was half-kidding, but around my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) books
are really not that expensive. I'd say the average price I pay for one is
10-15 euros, with the maximum at around 25 euros, and lots of 5 euro books
that I buy from antique bookstores. Yeah, were I to put together all the money
I paid for books I haven't read yet I would probably gather enough to pay for
a decent 7-day vacation in Greece (and I'm not talking about going to
expensive places like Santorini). I wouldn't be able to buy an apartment out
of it, which is what I would do with a sudden influx of "10x money".

~~~
gjm11
In some places it may cost more to shelve and house the books than to buy
them. (Unless you're happy storing most of your books in boxes.)

Probably not if you're in Eastern Europe, but if you're somewhere like San
Francisco or London then the cost of the extra space taken up by having a lot
of books may well be more than the cost of the books themselves.

(I live a little way outside Cambridge, in England. I reckon the price of an
extra reasonably-sized room is maybe £60k, and if that room is dedicated
entirely to books it can take maybe 4000 or so. So I'm paying about £15/book
for housing. If I were in Cambridge itself the figure might be 2x that or
more; in London, substantially more again; in New York, even more.)

~~~
paganel
I think having books in your house is totally worth the price, even in the
cases you mention, especially if you have kids.

IMHO having your kids being surrounded by books since an early age it's one of
the best ways to convince them that reading and wanting to learn about new
stuff is good. I personally put that above them attending a good school, and
I've read about lots of parents on HN choosing to purchase more expensive
houses only because they were closer to good schools.

~~~
gjm11
For the avoidance of doubt, I agree, and the reason I did that calculation in
the first place is that such a lot of the wall-space in my house is occupied
by books. (But there are no rooms completely given over to books; instead the
fiction is in the main bedroom, the academic-y books in the study, the humour
in the guest bedroom, etc.)

Our daughter reads a whole lot, but as well as growing up surrounded by books
she has very bookish genes, and bookish friends, and a library two doors down
the road, and so forth, so it's hard to disentangle the causes.

------
aggie
The nature of personal libraries has changed a lot, even in the past couple of
decades. In the past you might come across a book and then never see it again,
even with some effort to find it. Today, just about any book you are
interested in can be purchased on demand.

~~~
jacquesm
> Today, just about any book you are interested in can be purchased on demand.

There is a sizeable 'black hole' of books that are still in copyright but that
are not available digitally or in print. Your only chance for those is flea
markets and second hand stores and those are offering fewer and fewer books as
well.

I would not be surprised if after the whole digitization has run its course
that we end up with a large gaping hole in our records.

~~~
CamperBob2
I comfort myself with the assumption that companies like Google and Amazon
have at least _digitized_ everything they can put their hands on, even if they
can't release it.

Eventually copyright law will either go away entirely or catch up with
reality, and much knowledge that's hidden and presumed lost will be
universally available.

------
schlagetown
Love this. I've also been a big fan of the "antilibrary" concept since coming
across it in Black Swan a few years ago.

I've actually been working on a site to highlight all sorts of amazing
eclectic books in my own antilibrary. I also recently completed a Kickstarter
campaign to produce a printed publication focusing on some of these in more
depth.

For anyone interested, you can check out the site here to learn about all
sorts of fascinating books you may otherwise never stumble upon, but I think
are well worth knowing about!

[http://www.antilibrari.es/](http://www.antilibrari.es/)

------
thecity2
I buy books faster than I can read them, so I get it.

------
SnacksOnAPlane
I highly recommend bookbub.com for building up your own (e-book) anti-library.
Every day you get an email with a bunch of $1-3 books. I usually end up buying
at least a couple of them, because hey, $2. So now I've got a massive backlog
of books and can almost always find something worth reading.

Plus the variety keeps you from getting stuck in a reading rut with one type
of book.

------
mrlyc
I never have enough time to read so I've turned my anti-library into audio
files. Whenever I hear of an interesting book, I look up the author's name on
YouTube to find out if they've given an interview or a talk about the book. I
then download the video and convert it to an MP3.

------
npsimons
> “It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go
> wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,”

That's not knowledge - that's belief.

> Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Eh, I agree having books you can refer to is useful, but I would argue you
can't really refer to them unless you've read them. If they're really
worthwhile, you'll read them, learn something, and keep them for future
reference, perhaps even future re-reading.

~~~
theoh
Belief is mentioned later in the article, clarifying the meaning. But be
assured: knowledge is only ever a form of belief. The laws of physics could
change tomorrow (this is not precluded by any provable rule of existence).
Really everything we know, we know inductively. (Mathematical knowledge is
excluded from this obviously because of its weird, tautological nature--but
within math, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry is a good example of
things that were thought to be necessarily true turning out to be merely
axiomatic)

Another example of "knowledge" being used in the sense meant by the article is
this:

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know
for sure that just ain't so." \--Mark Twain

~~~
gjm11
"Quotations on the internet are often misattributed." \-- Abraham Lincoln

(The "what you know that ain't so" thing actually seems to have originated
with Josh Billings. I don't think Mark Twain used it.)

