Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Great minds ...

... Patrick Kurp on Peter Altenberg and collecting: `Outside the Sphere of One's Own Personality'.

I reviewed Telegrams of the Soul and have long been a fan of Peter Altenberg.

1 comment:

  1. As a "collector" of several thousand books* I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's notion of the anti-library explained here by Bjorn Staerk:

    "Taleb introduces the Hayekian and almost taoistic metaphor of the anti-library: A library of the books you haven't read, of the things you don't know. A massive collection of unknowledge, the anti-library contains all the books that may still change your life. Most of your favourite books are there, hidden and forgotten. It has facts you need to know, authors you'd worship. Only people who read very little can think the anti-library doesn't matter. To book-lovers, and especially generalists like me, who jump all over the place without focus, the stacks of the anti-library loom higher and darker for every book we read. Every book that changes me reminds me of the ones that still might."


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    *Mine is a modest collection compared to Umberto Eco the inspirer of Mr Taleb's notion of anti-library: he has an anti-library of over 30,000 volumes.

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