Antilibrary

 

The entry for ‘Antilibrary’ on Wikipedia exposes the pitfalls of Wikipedia. The term ‘antilibrary’ is said to be coined by Umberto Eco: “A collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read.” But the paragraph following that claims antilibrary was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, inspired by an idea of Umberto Eco’s. Books may have to be opened to resolve the coinage question. Homework so far indicates that Taleb takes his lead from Eco who, listening to visitors to his private library (thirty thousand books) either went wow have you read all these books, or else said they get it, it’s not an ego trip, a library is about research. This is where the non sequitur occurs. Taleb jumps to the conclusion that read books are far less valuable than unread books. “The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books,” Taleb conjectures. As a concept this is valuable, we ought to be open to the unknown. As a statement about our history of reading, it denies the extraordinary value we have already gained from the books we have read to this moment in time. I do wonder if this is what Eco had in mind. As well, where is the knowledge we have lost in information? as T.S. Eliot asks. That said, Taleb then introduces the word antilibrary, which is precisely the sum of the books we have not yet read. The prefix is being employed in a positive sense, anti- being the books available to us that we have not yet read, whether at home or away. It offers promise. For some of us, this is in fact the feeling we have any time we enter an actual library, a place that contains more books we haven’t read than books we have read, so maybe our local library is an antilibrary anyway. This is not abstruse thinking but has become fashionable, at least while ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ (21 February 2018) assures us not to worry about the piles of unread books mounting on all sides because they represent “curiosity, potential learning and inspiration.” Who can disagree? Stop and smell the roses. All of this becomes complicated by Wikipedia’s statement that the concept that antilibrary describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku. This turns out to be a narrow definition (“Books that have been purchased but not yet read”), if our broad definition of tsundoku is “the practice of buying more books than you can read.” Oddly, this only serves to describe the world most of us inhabit most of the time: a world where for every book we have available there is a related book we have yet to read, more than likely close to hand. It is this antilibrary of everything we have yet to read that tests our intellectual and emotional lives, if we are readers. Time will always be making available a book we cannot resist, a book that will improve or expand our awareness and enjoyment of existence. Though how we got to this point has much to do with the books we have already read, not the ones we haven’t.

Importance

 

It’s worth getting earnest about importance. Our personal libraries are the accumulated result of acquiring books we find important, even if others think differently. The effectual and ephemeral reside nearby with equal distinction. The vital and the vapid sit about the place in charming tsundoku positions. Surrounding ourselves with the objects of our satisfied desire is to remind us of this mutual value. Sentiment is one reason our books stay where they are; emotional attachment is another. Some books are important to keep because we will visit them again, sometime or other. The intellect is at play. Some books get us through a rough patch. Then, the tsundoku principle kicks in, we acquire these books to read some time, just don’t ask when. Some must have signed first editions, or anything in their area with a good review but always in hardback. Collectors of pop-up books call it a thing, as the latest acquisition opens with a hand standing on the page, made from origami card; this practice can get out of hand. Nothing can be more important to a reader than being in the midst of the book they cannot put down. Riveting, absorbing, engrossing, and other words involving physical connection are used to explain the feeling of a book they simply devour. The cool, calculating librarian can only guess from afar these private experiences of getting physical. They who can only rely on circulation statistics for meaning, the fortune wheel of the zeitgeist, or judging the book by its cover. Private collectors will surround ourselves with more of that which promises connection, thus at some future time turning these works into the importance of being important. If we manage a public library, the complexities proliferate. The importance of a book is tied existentially to its potential reader. This is why the latest edition of a textbook will only be important until the next edition comes along, while the uncut rectangle of yellowed pages dated 1923 can be the sole copy in existence, the lynchpin of a researcher’s construction, the missing link in their thesis. Which one do we cull first? Research libraries embrace, sometimes in an all-consuming way, their role as institutions of tsundoku. They give thanks daily for the privilege of having what no one else has and making it available, sometimes long after the book seemed to have lost any sense of importance. Our disposable, one-use society will keep relearning as if for the first time how importance has very little to do with sale and demand, the flying fickle finger of fashion, how its essential meaning is between the hand that wrote the page and the reader for whom this is the hit, the it and a bit, the rivet, the holy grail. Such a reader may visit the library sometime next week; or they may not yet have arrived at this our fretting stage of existence.

Thesis

 Another responsibility of the durable librarian is to assist a researcher in finding citations for their doctoral thesis. If their doctorate is on the history of tsundoku, for example, the primary source material is well-known to them, if no-one else, set out in their study space in randomly appealing piles. Our work begins with new literature on tsundoku, of the kind unattached to Amazon; articles in online journals with foolproof firewalls; the impossible-to-get pamphlet on Tsundoku Masters reportedly at the other end of a broken Wikipedia link. The would-be doctor pursues these fugitive obscurities with all the enthusiasm of a GP needing to know about a new pharmaceutical. The paper chase extends to microdots and wanton websites of extraneous opinion. Digital has only expanded the stacks of tsundoku exponentially. But then actually, reading all of this secondary literature is less important, it seems, than having (as researchers put it) seen it. Having seen it, it can then be added to their bibliography, a bulging balloon of citations at risk of growing larger than the thesis itself. I sometimes think this resources section should be headed ‘Tsundoku’, in the interests of complete honesty with their supervisors and examiners, as their bibliography fits the definition of collecting more books than they can read. Tsundoku creates the impression the citations have probably all been read, only which ones? Have they all at least been gleaned or skimmed? How many citations have been seen but not read? Anyway, once the searches are successful, the librarian has done his, her, or their work, retiring to help the next researcher, and leaving the pre-doctor in tsundoku heaven. That a librarian’s work entails a modicum of tsundoku is a realization that comes with time in the job. Although our purpose is to provide books that people will read, how many of them are actually read? Circulation records cannot give an answer. The library is a living, breathing model of tsundoku, which is just as well because it is that unread book ordered five years ago that come next Monday morning will be the one book a visiting scholar has to read now. This is true even of thesis collections, whether the thesis be ‘The History of Tsundoku’, or on some other subject. One chapter of that thesis has the heading ‘Surfeit’, a book arrangement that draws anxious sighs from an aesthete of book arts, a nervous clatter of spectacles with the scholar, but from the librarian a request at the next committee meeting for a double extension of the building, preferably yesterday. One person’s surfeit is another person’s surprise. One scholar’s pulp is another scholar’s grail.      

Tsundoku

 

Today I attended a university librarians’ day, an annual get-together of amongst the most vital people in the institution. Several sessions   saw recurring discussion of the now issue of digital and print resources, sometimes thought mistakenly as digital versus print resources. Asked how many e-books the university currently holds, our IT person guestimated four hundred thousand, and counting. Some would call this a professional example of tsundoku, the practice of buying more books than you can read. Now to be asked how many books in the library, I can reply nonchalantly, oh over four hundred thousand. The word emerged in the Meiji era (1868-1912), that is after Western culture took its kind of books into Japan. The pleasure of acquiring books overruled all sense of the time taken to read them, but then what are libraries for? And with the Japanese, aesthetics plays a leading part, tsundoku too possessing the meaning of leaving books lying around or stacked up to be read later, a visual delight all their own. It has not the connotation of hoarding, but rather of collecting for use in some unspecified future moment, maybe tonight, maybe next year, maybe never. Looks good. What’s in there? Read on. Bibliomania is an excessive end product of the practice, the superlative of tsundoku, because tsundoku itself is surrounded with an air of innocent discovery. I don’t have to be a librarian to find myself off the street magically in a bookshop curiously inspecting every new title on display and studying jackets and unquestioningly purchasing two three let’s make it five new books for that future moment when they can be either read, or left impressively scattered on level tabletops or set against others for mutual support on the latest shelf for that future unspecified moment. For many of us, the practice started young. It was necessary, even then, to have every book that we would possibly need to have read in the next twelve months. Which book was less the question than, which books? The solidity, the immediacy, the presence of the print book inspired tsundoku, too the unknowns within any one of those unread discoveries. This is to be surrounded by possibilities, things heard of, worlds and words heard about, to embark on one fine day. Much as e-books save clutter, they must be subscribed to, inscribed electrically on a page that tomorrow may be blank, their platform dropped, their space unreplaced. As I jotted down during the librarians’ day session, only print books exist in perpetuity. Which came first, librarians or tsundoku? A house of opened and unopened books is the home of interested existence.