Reveries of libraries, the forty-fifth: The Antilibrary

 

The entry for ‘Antilibrary’ on Wikipedia exposes the pitfalls of Wikipedia. The term ‘antilibrary’ is said to be coined by Umberto Eco: “A collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read.” But the paragraph following that claims antilibrary was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, inspired by an idea of Umberto Eco’s. Books may have to be opened to resolve the coinage question. Homework so far indicates that Taleb takes his lead from Eco who, listening to visitors to his private library (thirty thousand books) either went wow have you read all these books, or else said they get it, it’s not an ego trip, a library is about research. This is where the non sequitur occurs. Taleb jumps to the conclusion that read books are far less valuable than unread books. “The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books,” Taleb conjectures. As a concept this is valuable, we ought to be open to the unknown. As a statement about our history of reading, it denies the extraordinary value we have already gained from the books we have read to this moment in time. I do wonder if this is what Eco had in mind. As well, where is the knowledge we have lost in information? as T.S. Eliot asks. That said, Taleb then introduces the word antilibrary, which is precisely the sum of the books we have not yet read. The prefix is being employed in a positive sense, anti- being the books available to us that we have not yet read, whether at home or away. It offers promise. For some of us, this is in fact the feeling we have any time we enter an actual library, a place that contains more books we haven’t read than books we have read, so maybe our local library is an antilibrary anyway. This is not abstruse thinking but has become fashionable, at least while ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ (21 February 2018) assures us not to worry about the piles of unread books mounting on all sides because they represent “curiosity, potential learning and inspiration.” Who can disagree? Stop and smell the roses. All of this becomes complicated by Wikipedia’s statement that the concept that antilibrary describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku. This turns out to be a narrow definition (“Books that have been purchased but not yet read”), if our broad definition of tsundoku is “the practice of buying more books than you can read.” Oddly, this only serves to describe the world most of us inhabit most of the time: a world where for every book we have available there is a related book we have yet to read, more than likely close to hand. It is this antilibrary of everything we have yet to read that tests our intellectual and emotional lives, if we are readers. Time will always be making available a book we cannot resist, a book that will improve or expand our awareness and enjoyment of existence. Though how we got to this point has much to do with the books we have already read, not the ones we haven’t.