this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the "new ones", and asked if she could help.
I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.
I don't know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio...
There's having 30 books, and 10.000 books. There's probably a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. No one needs 10.000 books.
That reminds me of the section in Black Swan where Taleb talks about Umberto Eco's library:
"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 allows 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."