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I once heard a distinguished professor answer that question with "I have read at least half of them at least two-thirds of the way through." On the other hand, he had books that were nearly falling apart from re-reading.

Eco on libraries reminds me of a piece by Michael "Rands" Lopp from 2006:

"The cliche about hardware stores and people over thirty is this: it’s a toy store. We go there to buy crap that looks cool, but that we don’t really need. Wrong. My Dad was not wandering Orchard Supply looking for crap; my Dad was looking for ideas. That’s what a great tool does: it inspires you to build."

(http://randsinrepose.com/forums/)

https://archive.is/Qh4JY

I don't know where the notion of "have you read them all" come from. It's like food in the fridge, it contains stuff so I can consume when I want to. It is fun to hoard books too IMO.

The questions like "have you read them all" mostly come from people who never read.
I wonder if that attitude would make me feel better about my Steam game backlog.
Physical thing being, well, physical is something magical. Flipping a book gives a different full body experience than reading on screen. I guess similar can be said about seeing moving in cinema or attending music performance.
Somewhere I once read an answer from Umberto Eco to this question that was along the lines that if he had already read them he would not need to keep them, his library was explicitly mostly for things he hadn't read, so that he could always go and get something new from there whenever he wanted.

For some reason I had never thought about it myself, but that answer made a lot of sense to me when I read it (and still does). Until that moment I too was one of those people who thought one should have read most books in one's own library.

EDIT: Or was it Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Now that I tried to think about where I read that I'm beginning to doubt whom it was from. Or maybe Taleb talking about Eco? -- https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antili...

Usually it's considered wasteful to buy a lot of food you have no plans to eat. I think the same can be said about any physical resource.
Food rots. You're still taking care of the books you haven't read, and somebody else will have them after you're dead if you picked the right titles.

> Usually it's considered wasteful to buy a lot of food you have no plans to eat.

And if you only buy food when you have a immediate need to eat, you've chosen the most wasteful way to eat. You'll overpay, create more waste (packaging, imprecise portions), and immediately starve when you lose access to a continual supply.

> And if you only buy food when you have a immediate need to eat, you've chosen the most wasteful way to eat. You'll overpay, create more waste (packaging, imprecise portions), and immediately starve when you lose access to a continual supply.

That's why most people have a few days or weeks worth of food at home. Which is also what most people do with books. Having a library with hundreds or thousands of unread books is like having an aerated grain silo filled to the brim in your yard. Most people would say that such a thing is a bit excessive, and "can you eat all that?" would be a natural question upon seeing it.

Speaking of the idiom itself, not the content of the article.

What I find interesting, is in my experience, judging musical albums by their covers gives me good results consistently. Some of my greatest finds have simply been the result of being captivated by the artwork. Good albums can have bad covers from time to time, but bad music very rarely has something outstanding for their cover.

Publishers have a bit more control over the covers of the books they print, I expect it to reduce the usability of the heuristic considerably.

The opening paragraph is just weird. It does not sounds like the guy kept books secret ... he was just uninterested in social activities and discussions with strangers over them.

Those are two much different things.

> with a smirk, “Have you read all of these?”.

No obviously not, I do not read all tabs I have opened either. I also dont end up liking every book I buy or get gifted.

Its probably some kind of low blow to introverts, people who live like a hermit, or people on the spectrum (my wife and me belong to these categories).

'Have you read all of these' is also a dishonest question, and doesn't invite for a quality conversation about the content (the 'smirk' gives that away as well though even without that its obvious to me). It reminds me of the question 'have you stopped beating your wife', a fallacy actually.

I suppose a better question is 'which books stood out', as it allows for an in depth discussion and doesn't frame about talking about either 'the good' or 'the bad' books (though it does allow either, the responder is allowed freedom). Its a much better investigative question, allowing to feed curiosity. Not sure if its the best question to ask, but at the very least its much better.

A library is not a physical checklist of books you’ve read.

It is a research tool and a way to grab essential knowledge in physical form.

You can't judge a book by it's cover, But you can tell how much it costs - Carter USM