My friend and intern on our church staff, Scott Arany, sent me this quote. It's perfection! This is exactly how I feel about my library, estimated at around 1,000 - 1,200 books (not 30,000!).
From the introduction to The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are
encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large
personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates
visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore
Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?"
and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that 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.
From the introduction to The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
This is good—and useful in explaining the growing collection to family and friends.
Posted by: Nathan | June 03, 2009 at 05:25 PM