BUILDING MY ANTI-LIBRARY
The value and power of unread books
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We moved from Goose Creek to this new habitation in Floyd County 18 months ago. We are still, when feeling strong of body and secure in our marriage, unboxing books.
Until opened, they remain speed-taped shut since their last daylight exposure in northeast Floyd County in June of 2020. We get prickly heat cutting that tape now, knowing that if the contents of that box is 20 books, there will have 20 unique and mostly ambivalent and rarely unanimous decisions to make.
My 20 decisions on each book and hers might not (and likely will not) coincide. I say let it live. She says pull the plug. I say it's my book; she says its ours. Book triage--perhaps more than hanging wallpaper together--can pose a serious test of a marriage.
But there are some books coming out of the boxes whose fate is certain. They will stay.
The impulse for their purchase sprang out of topics discovered in other books (or online articles on topics of particular interest). These topic-extending books can allow me to dig wider or deeper into the subject. But the fact is, most of these books I have not yet read.
So won’t putting them on the shelves be a niggling reminder of my impulse purchases? I must save them, but why did I buy them in the first place to merely exist on my bookshelves, unread?
I now think of these few dozen books I describe here as my ANTI-LIBRARY.
These books represent what I don’t yet know about topics I learned of in other books. They should not make me feel guilty but energized, knowing a time will come when the new book will trigger memories to their “parent book” and new AHA connections will happen.
If you never heard the term ANTI-LIBRARY before, neither had I. But I bet you a beer that you have your own, and maybe have been a bit puzzled or uneasy like I have been about owning a library of unread books. If so, read more, with these resources for starters:
📕 Antilibrary: Why What You Don’t Know is More Valuable Than What You Know
“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 allow you to put there.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
Our knowledge is incomplete, imperfect, and infinitesimal in absolute terms. The antilibrary represents the unknowledge—the things we don’t know. Unknowledge is the only antidote to our overconfidence from knowledge.
A scholar is someone who knows many things. An antischolar is somebody who is humbly aware that they don’t know everything.
📕 Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books
Unread books are as powerful as the ones we read. An antilibrary is a private collection of unread books capturing the vastness of the unknown.
Unread books can be as powerful as the ones we have read, if we choose to consider them in the right light.
As Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell once said: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” An antilibrary is a reminder of everything we don’t know.
📕 Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones
It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay.
randall i think it is as much self knowledge through language as of things as material objects or rediscoveries of mere fact in 2nd and 3rd readings of the same book
Notice that according to these quotations, books offer only "knowledge." So much for fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and my job as an English teacher.