Tsundoku Reading Society
Developing the virtuous habit of reading and collecting good books.
“What a lot of books! Have you read them all?”
In a delightful essay, titled, “How to Justify a Personal Library,” the author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, wanted to answer a visitor who had poised this very question with something other than, “That’s a good one!” So he thought of replying with a sarcastic alternative: “I haven’t read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?”1
But that is a dangerous answer he explains, because “it invites the obvious follow-up: ‘And where do you put them after you’ve read them?’” So he decided on the riposte: “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.”2
This answer, of course, usually hastens the visitor’s moment of departure, a happy result for the bibliophile who wants to get back to his research and writing.
As someone who collects a lot of books myself, I once, tongue in cheek, asked the same question of a fellow whose spacious library I happened to be admiring. His diverting and jocular reply was something like, “Some of them twice!”
Such anecdotes might lead one to believe that people with lavish libraries tend to possess copious wit and wisdom. And that is generally the case. I say, generally, because there are nincompoops who collect books for pretense but seldom crack the covers of their prized collections.
But a person who consistently reads good books over the course of time it takes to collect a vast library will likely possess copiousness.
Derived from the Latin copia, copious literally means abundance. In rhetorical terms, copiousness refers to the mind material accumulated by the experience of life, the fodder of failure, and the absorption of wisdom from reading good literature.
Copiousness is the invaluable possession of a deep, refreshing pool of ideas, axioms, principles, proverbs, and anecdotes from which to draw delightful, compelling arguments and responses. But I am digressing.
I wrote about it here if you’d like to further explore the idea of copiousness.
In The Black Swan, Nassin Taleb reveals that our witty Italian professore had a personal library of more than 30,000 books in 2010. When Eco died in 2016, at the age of 84, sources claim the number was closer to 50,000. In either case, it was more books than any man could have read in his lifetime.
In light of this astonishing fact, Taleb summarizes a number of Eco’s compelling thoughts on the value of collecting more books than a person will read in his lifetime. He writes,
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 allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and growing the 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.3
Simply stated, an antilibrary represents a person’s conscious awareness of all that he or she does not know. So, instead of thinking of vast personal libraries as book hoarding, inordinate indulgence, or merely a sign of pretentiousness, maybe it would be better to think of collecting more books than can be read in a lifetime as a kind of intellectual humility. All of those menacing unread books are an encomium to curiosity, wonder, and want of knowledge.
It could even be said such incredible collections are material manifestations of Aristotle’s famous opening line in Metaphysics: “πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει (Pantes anthrōpoi tou eidenai oregontai physei) “All men naturally desire knowledge.”4
It is also reminder that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t really know—how much more there is to know. Outside of our conscious lack of knowledge lies an unconscious lack of knowledge. There are things we don’t even know we don’t know, and things we don’t now know that we will one day want to know.
In an essay delivered at the Biblioteca Comunale di Milano, later published in Italian and translated into English, Eco reaffirmed this when he declared to his audience,
“A library is not solely a place for books already read, but a reserve of materials for reading, browsing, researching, contemplating, or simply remembering that something unknown may be known.”
Naturally, Umberto Eco is not the only individual who collected a vast personal library. History is replete with both charming and somewhat alarming characters who participated in this oft-derided undertaking.
Fashion designer, Karl Lagerfeld, for example, had the largest personal collection known in modern history. When he died in 2019, he possessed a library of 300,000 books. In a Master Class, he told his audience, “Today, I only collect books; there is no room left for something else. If you go to my house, I’ll have you walk around the books. I ended up with a library of 300,000. It’s a lot for an individual.”
George Lucas has more than 27,000 volumes in his Lucasfilm Research Library.
Perhaps surprising to some, The King of Pop, Michael Jackson, was a bookworm who had 10,000 books+ in his library when he died. According to his longtime lawyer, Bob Sanger, Jackson “was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature.”
Author, Ernest Hemingway, had 9,000+ books in his library. William Randolph Hearst, the eccentric newspaper magnate, had 7,000 volumes—4,000 in the main library and 3,000 in his Gothic study library. Harry Houdini possessed 5,000+ volumes, mainly on magic and the occult, when he died in 1926. And the philosopher and historian, Hannah Arendt, had 4,000 books when she died in 1975.
George Washington’s study had 884 books in it, an impressive library for the 18th Century. And even more impressive, Thomas Jefferson sold his first library of 6,487 books to Congress for $23,950 in 1815.
As it so happens, there is a Japanese word for the habit of collecting large stacks of unread books. Tsundoku (sōōn dó kū) refers to the practice of buying a lot of books and keeping them in a pile because you intend to read them but have not done so yet; it is also used to refer to the pile itself.
In modern parlance, Tsundoku is fairly synonymous with the idea of Taleb’s antilibrary. I call those who keep buying books before they finish the ones they’re currently reading, piling up future reads with the hopeful anticipation of maybe someday getting around to them, practitioners of Tsundoku.
I would further argue that people who possess the insatiable desire to collect books and be surrounded by them—even though they acknowledge they will never read everything they collect—are actually prudent. Like the man who sees the danger and avoids it (Proverbs 22:3), these “see the wisdom” and surround themselves with everything they hope to know, want to know, are curious to know. They recognize the power of preparedness and prepositioning. Think of it as engineered serendipity.
In C. S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he describes his father’s affinity for keeping all the books he ever read and how his own childhood was serendipitously influenced by the books they kept in piles around the house. Lewis recounts,
I am a product…of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks in a field has of finding a new blade of grass.5
Incidentally, Lewis mentions reading books that were not suitable for him as a child. As important as that is for reminding us to decide wisely which books to pile up around ourselves, it is beside the point, which is to emphasize that a good personal library ought to be as vast a field of grass as one can reasonably afford, a field of books where one cannot but help stumble onto something new or unknown.
To circle back around to the question that started this discursive discourse—“What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” —I’ll conclude with statements from Eco for those who remain unconvinced. The first is an admonition and second an exhortation.
The professor contends,
At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books, people accustomed to seeing a couple of shelves with five paperback mysteries and a children’s encyclopedia, bought in installments. But experience has taught me that the same words can be uttered also by people above suspicion. It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already-read books and do not think of the library as a working tool. But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning, and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.6
Tsundoku, or the antilibrary, is often a provocation for all of us who have neglected our natural human proclivity to know, for us who have squandered our time with less important, less consequential matters than reading good books where we might pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful.
But all is not lost. Eco further exhorts the tormented and remorseful that “it’s possible to build an impressive collection of twentieth-century literature for no more than a few meals at a restaurant.”7
If this post resonates with you, consider joining the Tsundoku Reading Society with a Paid Subscription or a Poiema Fellowship. We are a merry band of bards, bishops, and bibliophiles, students, scholars, and philosophers, and poets, preachers, and pirates who gather online monthly to discuss the best of what has been thought and written because we thoroughly enjoy the crisp, clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our stifled modern minds. You don’t have to be a scholar to join the conversation. You just need a good internet connection, webcam, and mic paired with a spirit of wonder and a longing for that which is good, true, and beautiful.
For the month of June, I’m offering 20% OFF a Paid Subscription (use the link above), plus a chance to win a boxed set of C. S. Lewis’s Signature Works.
June Reading and Discussion
In “De Descriptione Temporum”, C. S. Lewis argues that the greatest shift in Western history takes place, not at the fall of Rome or the Renaissance, but at the time shortly following Jane Austen. His arguments are compelling but if you accept his thesis, it may forever change the way you see history. Read his essay to find out why. You can download it here for free.
Steps to Follow
If you want to join me and others for a live discussion of C. S. Lewis’s grand essay, just upgrade to a Paid Subscription (just $5.60 if you upgrade before June 30th) or a Poiema Fellow and you’ll automatically be added to the Tsundoku Reading Society.
Next, download the essay; read it; mark it up; ask questions of the text. Then, watch your inbox for login instructions to join the Zoom meeting on Monday, June 30th at 4:00 pm PT (7:00 pm ET). It’s that simple.
Got questions? email me@scottpostma.net.
Eco, Umberto. How to Travel with a Salmon: And Other Essays (A Harvest Book) (Function). Kindle Edition.
Eco, Umberto. How to Travel with a Salmon: And Other Essays (A Harvest Book) (Function). Kindle Edition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, NY: Random House, 2016), 1.
Aristotle, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ed. W.D. Ross” (Medford, MA: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) and Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18, Translated by Hugh Tredennick. (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1933, 1989).
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2017), 9-10.
Eco, Umberto. How to Travel with a Salmon: And Other Essays (A Harvest Book) (Function). Kindle Edition.
Eco, Umberto. Chronicles of a Liquid Society (p. 237). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Hi Scott, I emailed you with a question about 5 days ago but I haven’t heard back and I’m not sure you if you received my message. I know you’re very busy and don’t want to disturb you. I have a question about the Tsundoku Society. Can you tell me how is best for me to reach you?