After a lifetime as a reader, studying English in undergrad, working with book publishers and writers across two provinces, attending book & publishing conferences where advanced reading copies are given out freely, even hitting way too many charity book sales and garage sales in my life, I suspect I own roughly a thousand books.
How many books is that?
Well, the picture above is roughly half the books I own. 😮
Enough books that when we moved, the weight of the book boxes frontloaded in our shipping container almost made it so the driver couldn’t unload it properly (something he said he hadn’t seen in three years of doing that job!)
Marie Kondo gets a lot of attention these days for her KonMari decluttering techniques including her recommendation to “only keep items that you give you joy when you hold them in your hands” with her recommendation that you should own ~30 books at max.
No surprise that I happen to think that’s bullshit. 🙂
One such study found that children who grew up in homes with between 80 and 350 books showed improved literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology skills as adults. Exposure to books, the researchers suggested, boosts these cognitive abilities by making reading a part of life’s routines and practices.
Marie Kondo’s philosophy is Japanese but there’s a corresponding Japanese philosophy of surrounding yourself with books – tsundoku – as a way of reminding yourself of all the things you don’t know.
This concept is also known as an “anti-library” – a collection of books you know you’ll never have time to read but which reflects your desire to know and learn and grow.
Taleb laid out the concept of the antilibrary in his best-selling bookThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He starts with a discussion of the prolific author and scholar Umberto Eco, whose personal library housed a staggering 30,000 books.
When Eco hosted visitors, many would marvel at the size of his library and assumed it represented the host’s knowledge — which, make no mistake, was expansive. But a few savvy visitors realized the truth: Eco’s library wasn’t voluminous because he had read so much; it was voluminous because he desired to read so much more.
Eco stated as much. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he found he could only read about 25,200 books if he read one book a day, every day, between the ages of ten and eighty. A “trifle,” he laments, compared to the million books available at any good library.
So yes, it probably seems strange to own so many books, doubly so when I work in a public library and can walk out with pretty much any book I want to read any day. But, at least for the time being, I’m very happy to have a house full of books!
(As shown in the picture above, it’s a separate entry about my choice to keep using my cheap “college-style” bookshelves made of shelving boards and bricks, even after we recently moved into a beautiful new house. But yes, after pricing out both custom bookshelves (!!) and even IKEA solutions (!), I decided that using the shelves I already owned and that were cheap but functional was the best way to go – at least in our basement den where they’ll be less visible. I do have nicer shelves in our upstairs office and the bedrooms for instance!)
I linked to a good article above the pull quote above but the whole thing is so good, I’m going to quote more of it…
Drawing from Eco’s example, Taleb deduces:
“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] 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. [Emphasis original]”
Maria Popova, whose post at Brain Pickings summarizes Taleb’s argument beautifully, notes that our tendency is to overestimate the value of what we know, while underestimating the value of what we don’t know. Taleb’s antilibrary flips this tendency on its head.
The antilibrary’s value stems from how it challenges our self-estimation by providing a constant, niggling reminder of all we don’t know. The titles lining my own home remind me that I know little to nothing about cryptography, the evolution of feathers, Italian folklore, illicit drug use in the Third Reich, and whatever entomophagy is. (Don’t spoil it; I want to be surprised.)
“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended,” Taleb writes. “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.”
These selves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls this realization intellectual humility.
People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for decoration alone. Not a living, growing resource we can learn from until we are 80 — and, if we are lucky, a few years beyond.
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