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The Books You Haven’t Read Are More Important Than Those You Have
You don’t know what you don’t know
If you had visited the home of the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, before his death in 2016, you would have been blown away by the sheer number of books in his possession.
Eco had over 30,000 books in his apartment in Milan and another 20,000 in a vacation house near Urbino. 50,000 books is a lot. The vast majority of people will never read anywhere near that figure in their lifetime.
Indeed, one of the things that annoyed Eco the most when people saw his vast personal library for the first time was their reaction. They would often exclaim, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?”
While this may sound like a logical question to ask a man with a huge collection of books, on deeper introspection it is the wrong question.
In a way, the question that the mountain of books is merely a tool for showing off. A way of saying to everyone who enters the apartment, look how intellectual and learned I am.
That is missing the point spectacularly.
Eco did not have all these books just for show, they were there to fulfil his intellectual curiosity. To plug gaps in his knowledge.
