Member: landschaft_archt

"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non-dull. 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 that 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 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 anti-library." Nassim Nicholas Taleb, first paragraph in "The Black Swan"

posted by landschaft_archt at 2:26 pm (EST) on Aug 24, 2009

Books in Teddy Roosevelt's log ranch house library: 'The Still-Hunter: A Practical Treatise on Deer Stalking' by Theodore S. Van Dyke; 'The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabitants' by Richard Irving Dodge; 'Deer and Antelope of America', John Dean Caton; 'Birds of the North-west, by Elliott Coues; 'Histories of the early Canadians by Francis Parkman; also works by Washington Irving , Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell; Ik Marvel (Donald Grant Mitchell), John Burroughs, Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, Sherwood Bonner and Edgar Allen Poe.

posted by landschaft_archt at 9:25 pm (EST) on Aug 9, 2009

The Stegner and Least Heat Moon, and the Aggie Football.

posted by JoeDrape at 4:19 pm (EST) on Aug 9, 2009

Six books owned by Abraham Lincoln:
The Bible, The Works of Shakespeare, Aesops Fables-Slave Tales, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, The Columbian Orator

posted by landschaft_archt at 12:36 pm (EST) on Apr 24, 2009

In 1815, Jefferson had sold his personal collection of 6,487 books to the Library helping to rebuild the holdings which had been destroyed when the British burned the Capitol during the War of 1812.

posted by landschaft_archt at 9:40 am (EST) on Nov 1, 2007

"Even the invention of printing did not at first modify the composition of libraries: religious books, poets and philosophers were the foundation light. Reading was provided by Homer or by the historian. The libraries of kings and those of the rich monasteries seldom counted more than a few thousand volumes..."

"Spinoza possessed less than sixty volumes, Kant collected three hundred, and half of his number were narratives of travel, for Kant had a frivolous side."

Ernest Dimnet in "The Art of Thinking"

posted by landschaft_archt at 4:53 pm (EST) on Jul 10, 2007