The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable · chapter 1 · id the-black-swan-c1-04-umberto-eco-owned-a-personal-l
“Umberto Eco owned a personal library of 30,000 books. Taleb uses Eco to illustrate the concept of the 'anti-library' -- that unread books are more valuable than read ones because they represent the vast territory of the unknown.”
VERIFIEDconfidence: high⚠ extracted by pipeline, re-audit pending
Receipts
The Marginalian: Umberto Eco's Antilibrarysource alive
Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He owned a large personal library of thirty thousand books.
Washington University Common Readersource alive
Eco's library grew to over 50,000 volumes by some accounts, and was once so large it got him evicted because the city engineer feared the building would collapse.
Open Culture: Why Umberto Eco Kept an Antilibrarysource alive
Eco separated visitors into two categories: those who reacted with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you actually read?' and the others -- a very small minority -- who understood that a private library is a research tool.
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