I subscribe to several newsletters (you can subscribe to my newsletter here). The explosion of newsletters has some worried that there are too many newsletters and the landscape will soon be an unfettered electronic jungle like the social media landscape eventually fatiguing and exhausting us. Maybe the worry is that with too many newsletters, the noise would crowd the signals.
Complaining that there are too many newsletters is like complaining that there are too many books and too many magazines in the world. It is a “fact”-y sounding somewhat facetious statement, and ultimately a poor way to understand reading and learning about the world.
In fact, I think that there is a lot more reading going on in the world as textual communication has exploded. Most of us are “readers” and “writers”, as we read and write a lot of perfunctory stuff: memos, drafts, emails, chats, manuscripts, reports, reports on reports — and in the pandemic stricken world, add massive volumes of text messages and emojis that have replaced words — we read so much and write so much. I even can’t help reading the subtitles and closed captions when I watch films (yes, even the ones in English). It is just that reading for fun has diminished. I recognize that reading for fun is a pursuit among those of us who have time for leisure (many still need to work long hours to make their ends meet). Too few people read for fun.
Eco’s Library
I admire Umberto Eco for his prodigious span of knowledge of the world and his sense of humor. A professor of semiotics, a dabbler in all sorts of arcane information, Eco is reputed to have a home-library of 30,000 books. (Alas, mine can never measure up). In his BBC World Book Club interview, when Harriett Gilbert the interviewer, speculates on the number of books in Eco’s Milan home library, he disarmingly muses: “In Milan, 30,000. All Together there are 50,000”. Of course, Eco himself knows that there is no way he has read all the books he owns. But I bet he knows why each book got on the shelf.
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In the chapter on “How to justify a private library”, in his book “How to Travel with a Salmon: and Other Essays”, he writes about a visitor entering his Milan home.
The visitor enters and says, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?”
Eco is bemused and ponders that
“It could be said that there are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage-place for already-read books, and do not consider the library as working tool.”
He contemplates various answers that range from a quick dismissal to utmost earnestness and finally decides on:
“These are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. The rest I keep in my office.”
One purpose of reading books is to discover things you do not know about, invariably including some “new” books that did not exist in your ken. Nassim Taleb, who is also an esoteric polyglot (and a Management Science Ph.D.), introduces the notion of Anti-library.
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.
Anti-library is a peculiar word. Like wisdom, we define it by the expanse of its complement set. We know the understand our knowledge, by what we do not know.
Once we accept that there is not enough time to read every written word in the world, the knowledge releases our reading from the yoke of completion.
Clogged Inboxes and Cluttered Homes?
Newsletters will clog up our inboxes, the skeptics worry. They fear that such emails will soon be like spam or the uninformative collection of emails from the store you visited once when on a trip. For sure, some newsletters go into spam, as your tastes change.
Newsletters will clog our inboxes like books that lie around in a reading home. At the extreme, they surely take up space, but they enliven our living spaces. It is fantastic to walk into a room and find a half-read book that invites you back right in. On my side table, by this not-so-comfy sofa, lay a copy of Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne and a dog-eared copy of Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess, an excellent idiosyncratic approach to learning chess endgames. I have not read both the books cover to cover. Neither have I ever planned on reading them in one go. They are not textbooks that I have internalized. I’ll never learn to play chess like Fisher and write in French like Montaigne, but the essays and puzzles in the books have given me moments of unbridled joy.
Newsletters are a bit like that. I subscribe to quite a few — I read them at random. I let them lie around in my inbox, like books at my home. They live in my inbox in chronological sequences, like weirdly sequenced books in my house.
It is also a wonderful advantage that newsletters, like books, skip the “look-at-planet-me” component of the social media world. Loyal readers know that reading Hofstadter is more pleasurable than being seen to read Hofstadter. It is a conversation with a best friend — the pleasure and privacy of it. You don’t need to justify it. You can begin the dangling conversation, depart to attend your usual chores, come back. A great book, like a genuine friend, waits, and in waiting, doesn’t make you guilty.
We should see email newsletters this way — subscribe away; let them collect in the cobwebs of our virtual bookshelf and become our anti-library.
Subscribing to a newsletter like buying a book — it is just an expression of intent, and just a recognition that the book exists. Thereafter, the book is yours. Hence, newsletters, like books, have to earn your attention. Read them at random, as your time allows. Newsletters, like books, are here to make you better.
It is the conceit of the newsletter writer to imagine that they are writing a Telenovela — and the readers should follow the “plot”. Some newsletter writers imagine they own the reader’s attention and readers know the progression of their thought. “I wrote about so-and-so concept in that post, but you missed it”, they chastise the readers, as if the readers were dozing in the middle of a lecture.
If you are reading this, realize that the writers (including me) don’t own your attention. Writers own subscribers only like a book owns its row on the bookshelf. Subscribers arrive and depart randomly — they have no reason to know a writer’s past and discern the end. Subscribers are waders dipping their feet in the waters on the banks. The river knows its own history and may have journeyed tumultuously, like the mighty Zambezi, from its headwaters, but it does not matter to the wader in the calm. The wader, like the reader, is there to just spend the moment.
The newsletter should abide — it should wait as it builds a reader’s virtual anti-library.
So we should guard our minds like our homes. Let the newsletters you love, enter your anti-library, but when and how you read them is entirely your choice. All the emails and books can wait for your time. For those also serve, who stand and wait.
You can subscribe to my newsletter here — Thank you for welcoming this post into your anti-library collection.