The antilibrary of Umberto Eco a collection of unread books

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The antilibrary of Umberto Eco a collection of unread books

18 November 2022

Late Italian medievalist, philosopher, and novelist Umberto Eco amassed a collection of thirty-thousand books during his life, and can be seen here taking viewers on a short tour of his acquisitions.

But who has time to read that many books? Probably not even the most ardent of readers. But that’s not the reason Eco accumulated so many tomes: he wanted to create an antilibrary. And an antilibrary, as Anne-Laure Le Cunff, writing for Ness Labs explains, is not for the vain — those wanting to show off a vast book collection — but rather, for the curious:

The goal of an antilibrary is not to collect books you have read so you can proudly display them on your shelf; instead, it is to curate a highly personal collection of resources around themes you are curious about. Instead of a celebration of everything you know, an antilibrary is an ode to everything you want to explore.

For sure, the curator of any sizeable antilibrary won’t have read every title in the collection, but the books are instead present for reference, a constantly available, off-line, trove of information.

Homer frustrated writers by using the best Homeric Epithets three-thousand years ago

8 August 2011

John Barth, writing for The Atlantic:

When the eminent Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco visited Johns Hopkins some decades ago, he spoke of the problem, for contemporary writers, of the “already said”: the circumstance that because Homer, for example, spoke so memorably in The Odyssey of the “wine-dark sea” and of “rosy-fingered Dawn,” nearly 3,000 years’ worth of poets and storytellers have had to find other images for sea and sunrise — a task that must become increasingly difficult as the repertory of possibilities is exhausted.

It’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it… writers have been struggling for three thousand years to write prose and poetry that is original.

Originally published Monday 8 August 2011, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.