Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/21/umberto-eco-looks-for-a-book-in-his-private-library.html
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30,000 books
Let’s say over 60 years
That’s like accumulating 500 books a year.
Basically adding a couple every single working day of your life.
I suspect he may have acquired some other collections, en masse.
I assume he was his own librarian? How did he find time to write? 
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That library is so big if he tried to call to someone on the other side he’d get an Umberto echo.
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I think this is the heart of the matter. The books weren’t all read. They were a private internet. The most important function is search and discovery.
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Agreed. My office has a few hundreds of books on the shelves. Students come in [or, used to, pre-Covid] and would marvel “Oh my gosh, all these books. It’s amazing that you’ve read all these.” It was a bit of a downer for them to hear that many of them are for reference, many were sent to me to read and I haven’t, some I picked up so that I could read but never got around to doing so, and that I’d read around 75%, for various definitions of “read” [deep reading, grad student-style reading, skimming, etc etc].
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I was taught early on that the point of a filing system was not where to put things but how to be able to easily retrieve them when they are needed!
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Did he lose his copy of Aristotle’s “On Comedy” in there?
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And right there (ladies and germs), we have the origin of his inspiration for the library labyrinth in The Name of the Rose
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Can his place be the next https://boingboing.net/2020/10/28/people-are-treating-this-3d-real-estate-home-tour-like-a-videogame.html ?
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I’d wager it’s equal parts personal experience and this gem of Jorge Luis Borges:
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Life goals.
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Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?"
Walter Benjamin
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My biggest surprise is that they are all on the shelves with their spines not visible!
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In one of his columns in the Italian magazine Espresso, he mentioned his library. Some visitors, gazing upon his vast collection of books, would ask him “Did you read all of these?”. To spare them the embarrassment of having to lecture them on the fact that one does not simply ‘read a library’, he would answer “These, and many, many more.”
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Maybe not.
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Quote’s from Paul Ford. I’ve been thinking about that, too. The more old books I get, the more I realize: this is not on the internet.
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Any book or music purge I’ve made for space, it’s only readily available stuff that will never go out of print.
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Right? Especially older book that are long out of copyright or even older books that you can only find in archives that have not been digitized. And that doesn’t even get to books that are hard to access for other kinds of reasons (copyright issues, for example). And how about non-western works in more obscure languages?
If one of the promises of the internet was that we’d have all of human knowledge at our fingertips… well, not yet. Maybe one day, but maybe not. Given that not all knowledge can be recorded in some digital format, it might not ever happen.
I suspect everything will go out of print one day… some of that might be well past our lifetimes.
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It always seems to me that in an age when there is print on demand, that if you can’t provide a way for people to purchase your book, you ought to lose your copyright. There shouldn’t be a book that was published in 2002 that is unavailable now.
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That pun was bad enough to get an upvote from me; First, I groaned. Then I chuckled. Well done, sir!
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