The Value of Unread Books

I did some calculations. Suppose one could read a book a day. In a year, that’s 365 books. In ten years, 3,650. Over an eighty-year lifespan, 29,200. But of course, in the first ten years of life, one cannot read much, since one must first learn to read. Let’s then say that in seventy years—purely theoretically—one could manage 25,550 books. Yet, since life demands attention to many other matters, it would be a remarkable feat to get through even half of them—let’s say 12,775.

Umberto Eco owned roughly 35,000 volumes, so it goes without saying that he hadn’t read them all. When asked the familiar question every collector of a vast library encounters—“Have you read all these books?”—Eco replied: “No, but I keep them to remind myself of what I should have read.”

Of course, some books are precious even if we only skim them or search them for a few nuggets of information hidden in a sea of text. There is also an indirect way of knowing a book—through other books. In his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil describes a librarian who resolved never to read any of the books in his library—except those that discussed other books! He cared less about the books themselves than about the relationships between them: a prelude, decades later, to what literary critics would call “intertextuality” in the 1960s.

I own only about 10,000 books. Though this falls short of the theoretical 12,775, I have not read them all. Yet I am convinced of the value of books one possesses but has not read. Their very presence constantly reminds us of themes and questions we have yet to explore, and it is a wonderful thing that they do. They prompt us to be cautious, and, if necessary, to withdraw from conversation.

The truly insoluble problem, however, lies with the books we do not own, and by extension, with everything we do not know that we do not know. That is where our vulnerability is greatest. To speak beyond the boundaries of our knowledge and conscious ignorance is to tread a minefield.