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Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

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Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#21

Post by theoh »

npsimons wrote: post #14

> “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…

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

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#22

Post by lukas099 »

paganel wrote: post #20
09bjb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 re…

(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.

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#23

Post by paganel »

lukas099 wrote: post #22
paganel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

(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".

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#24

Post by 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.

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#25

Post by LTom »

tjr wrote: post #6
theptip wrote: post #3

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?

An ante-anti-library, perhaps?

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#26

Post by jacquesm »

riffraff wrote: post #10

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.

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#27

Post by jacquesm »

aggie wrote: post #24

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.

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#28

Post by gjm11 »

09bjb wrote: post #17
prestonbriggs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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%.)

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#29

Post by 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/

Re: Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)

#30

Post by gjm11 »

paganel wrote: post #23
lukas099 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

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.)

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