From the proud owner of a growing antilibrary

Finally, I find a justification (external to my own self-justifications) for owning all these books.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about Umberto Eco’s large personal library (containing thirty thousand books) in the introduction of part one of The Black Swan [via kottke.org]:

… 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. 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.

I don’t quite have 30,000 books. I do, however, have a few Eco books that I haven’t yet read.