date created: 2024-08-19 13:40
date modified:: 2025-04-25 11:37
Status:: 🌱seedling

An antilibrary is a collection of unread books

Coined by Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan

The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow 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.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head.

See also: Tsundoku is the art of acquiring books but not reading them

Compare and contrast with The collector's fallacy states that collecting knowledge is not the same as having knowledge