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I found this related saying from Eco even more insightful (at least for me and for my particular case): > The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that 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 allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing 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. I've just turned 40 recently and I've started to realise that no, I won't get to read all the books that I already have in my library, but in the last few years (and especially during the pandemic) I think I've started to "accelerate" the purchasing of books related to fields of knowledge I'm interested in and of which I don't know that many things. For example just yesterday I bought "The European Right: A Historical Profile" co-authored by Eugen Weber [1] because I've already read Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914" which I found highly interesting and because I found it interesting that in the 1960s (i.e. relatively shortly after WW2) the people were still seeing the proto-European fascists as being right-wing, nowadays they would just be called populists, in other words I was interested in reading in the 2020s a book written in the 1960s about an European political movement that took place in the early 1900s. There's a big chance I will not get to read that book in the next 2-3 years, but by just purchasing it and having in my head all the internal conversation I tried to summarise above has give me an extra "intellectual" (for lack of a better word) something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber |