Anti-library & Ante-Library

2022 Year of Aesthetics Series №21

Nassim Taleb introduced the idea of the anti-library, the repository of unread books full of wonders and duds that we are blissfully ignorant of or painfully aware of. The idea of anti-library has also become an expression of those books that are in the anteroom just outside our personal library of read books. It is a place of potential but we are limited on how many books can move from anti /ante-library space to our library. I have an active reading shelf with the pile of next to read books a queue of 150 some books, as well as about a 800 book library, but I can access most books written by a great library system .

I find two great things about the idea anteroom idea is that you can let friends put books in this space and reviewed books, books you pick off the library shelf, and decide if they will move back to the anti-library or enter ones library. Larry McMurtry who at one time owned more books than any other person the earth discussed that as an owner of books that there will be a time that you will be able to part with books or at least some of your books. I have done major culling of my shelves and honed down the books I want to possess. I want a nice library and a health anteroom, but not every book needs to be on the shelf. I also am buying better volumes of books I want to reread, there is an aesthetic pleasure to reading a fine volume.

There is also the idea that our knowledge of books is fleeting and very incomplete. That we skim scan and absorb selectively what we want from books without fully incorporating them, it is if some of the book remains in the anti-library and our personal antechamber. Pierre Bayard book How to Talk About Books You Have not Read examines the idea of incomplete and nonreading, it is very inciteful on our limitations. It also reminds me of Montaigne struggle with notes and essays to struggle with remembering what he had read. How he was ever loosing this battle and yet feeled compelled to read or Juvenal Urbino del Calle in Love in Time of Cholera who was fighting a battle against senility who was living on notes written to himself but forgetting the notes or their meaning later. Taleb stress books we love we reread we want to gain more from and it is a increased investment of time. He sees this as the highest praise a book can receive.

Borges describes three hellish book related landscapes an infinite library, an infinite book and having all the memories of Shakespeare. Borges understood in an infinite stream of information books would become noise and just infinite variation of the nonsensical and self pleasing noise we would seek out to cater to our own very personal biases. With Shakespeare’s memory in total we would begin to loose ourselves in the other mans history. He deals with books always being selective information. His fictions are full of complicated musing on what books and prose are. He is also saying we have a limited library.