No, this is not about a fable of Aesop’s nor a romance set in the book stacks! The ‘antilibrary’ is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan. It contains books about all the things you know that you don’t know, but are curious about: a personal reminder of how much there still remains to be learnt about the world. The shelves of unread books are an acknowledgement of the gaps in one’s knowledge and are place-markers for attention and curiosity, telling ourselves “I want to know more about this”.
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
When reading this it occurred to me that certain types of field guides are a kind of antilibrary of things we want to know more about, or to add to our collection of things seen. I was particularly reminded of the iSpy books I had as a child. iSpy books, which are still published in the UK today, are a set of field guides aimed at children that were intended to be a kind of scavenger hunt. Each book has a narrow topic – cars, dogs, wildflowers – with some information and a space to record where and when you saw the item. In listing ‘all’ the car brands or dog breeds the books contained a type of ‘antilibrary’: here are all the things you want to see and know about, all the still-unseen things, like the still-unread books.
Perhaps Richard Feynman would have had an antilibrary; he certainly knew about ‘not knowing’.
“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is not progress without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified – how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”
Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Both the antilibrary and the field guide highlight ways in which our knowledge is incomplete. The point is to acknowledge that we can not, and will not, know everything, but that we can attempt to bridge that gap.