Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

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"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: (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."

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

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

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...

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

Nice.

I don't envy his books, I envy his shelves.

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...

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

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Frag...

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

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?

Schrodinger's library

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...

A tip is essentially an LRU cache:

https://www.ft.com/content/e6f82da0-8b4d-11e6-8cb7-e7ada1d12...

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

An ante-anti-library, perhaps?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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/

Enjoy the illustrations: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/15/the-three-astronaut...

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

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.

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.

> 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.

(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.

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".

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

Peer. Group. See the thread the other day about rich kids vs. poor kids prepping for the SAT. Their peers set their norms, which determines what they'll actually do (you can tell them to do otherwise all day long—it'll barely matter). For all the talk about funding and such, the people in and related to a school—students, parents, teachers, roughly in order of importance—account for about 90% of what distinguishes a "good" school from a "bad" one. Norms set by parents at a young age (you can try to break out of your normal behavior for your class/SES to adjust your kids' experience "up", but it'll be damn difficult) and peers throughout school are THE most important factor for later outcomes. You can buy (improved probability of better) peers with money—spent on either housing or the right private school, or, failing that, carefully chosen extracurriculars and summer programs. It's kind of worse than if the problems with schools were just funding-related, actually, but that's how it is.

Agreed about the books being important, though. I was just starting a to-ebooks transition intended to replace at least 2-3 hundred of my books, then we started having kids, and I thought about what it would have been like to grow up with such a huge selection of excellent books right there in my house. Trend halted and reversed immediately, haha.

Assuming your city has a public library, and you check out only 10 books a month, your child will be exposed to many more books growing up than if you buy books (as buying you are limited by space and money).

Of course, one can check out way more than 10 books per month if they are really a bookworm.

Do not forget about the 'latte effect'. You must include in the cost in books the opportunity cost of not investing that money instead.

Assuming an average 12.5 euros (13.70 dollars) per book, one book read every 14 days, and 7% return on investment, you actually spend 4527.97 euros every 10 years on books.

Over 30 years that number jumps to 31914.92 euros.

Note: I used https://financialmentor.com/calculator/latte-factor-calculat... to calculate.

> if you have 10x more money than you need

No: if you have 10x more money than you need to spend on books. That's not such a high bar to clear.

(And most people who buy a lot of books they don't read immediately do so less spectacularly than Eco. I consider myself to have a pretty bad case of Unread Book Syndrome, and for me the excess is more like 10-15%.)

I had more books than I could reasonably read when I was still an undergrad on student welfare payments. Books aren't that expensive...

The most valuable book in the world is the one you need, but don't own, at 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning.

At least that's my excuse.

What makes you say that about Taleb? I mean, dude's got a huge ego, but he seems to back it up pretty well.

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.

> 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.

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.

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/

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

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.

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.

> “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.

But how would an individual know the difference between "knowledge" and "belief"?

Some say that knowledge is justified true belief[1], others disagree[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justified_true_belief#Justifie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

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

"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.)

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