Tiny Books

The University of Iowa in Iowa City has a collection of the tiniest books ever made.  They apparently have a set of appropriately-tiny shelves that the books live on, and the smallest is the size of a ladybug.

Unread Books Are The Most Useful

We have a huge collection of books, between the Wifey, myself, and the kids. It is not worth much in actual financial value, seeing as most are 50¢ thriftshop and garage sale books, but we love them anyway. We do, invariably, get the "boy, you must read a lot" comment from the sellers of the books, and while it's generally true, we purchase far more books than we actually sit down to read. There is an underlying fear that this reflects poorly on us, that there is an unvirtuous imbalance between ambition and effort when it comes to our love for books, but Umberto Eco explains it best in the introduction to The Black Swan:

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 will 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 antilibrary.

Far from just a justification of owning lots of books without reading them, the Black Swan theory explains why this is a necessity to people who understand they do not know it all. In the theory, emphasis is on understanding (but not necessarily predicting) the high-impact but unpredictable factors in understanding the world around you. Discovering a black swan, when all evidence points towards all swans being white, is a paradigm-shifting idea but without any evidence to predict it to be true. People have pointed out how D and I have involved, detailed conversations, and how we talk far more than other couples, and not just "what'd you do today" or "saw the funniest thing on TV last night." Most of the time, we're talking about the new things we've learned recently, stories of Death Valley model railroaders and Irish terrorists in 19th Century Minnesota. This would not be possible if we didn't have a huge resource of unknowns in our immediate vicinity: the only way to learn is to have access to the not-yet-learned. We are constantly extending the reach of our knowledge, expanding out understanding of the world, and we can't do that if we spend our time watching TV or playing video games. Even with the internet in front of us all day, most of the new, amazing things we learn come from old books and vintage magazines, both of which we collect and hoard for the pleasure of owning information that we do not yet know.


Via, but further back via.

Tending Your Bookshelves

The Wifey and I aren't so good at this (and, I must admit, I'm better at it than the Wifey); our recent solution was to buy some taller shelves to put more books on. Laura Miller of the New York Times was forced into the position by a need for repainted walls. Like a fine English garden, you need to do some pruning and cultivating for a book collection to remain clean, pretty, and wanderable. Your criteria for what's a weed and what's a flower is a matter of your personality.

The Most Expensive Book In The World

The Task is a book of philosophical poetry, written by philosophical poet Tomas Alexander Hartmann. While the guy doesn't seem to exist online, nor does he appear in the news aside from his newest book, he believes his work demands a high price. The Task has a print-count of only one edition, thirteen pages, with a cover price of €153,000,000. Yes, six zeroes, making it the Most Expensive Book In The World. He believes that, because he had worked on the book for thirty years, he deserves a €5,000,000 stipend as restitution, payable by the one person willing to read the book. Hopefully Amazon will carry it, and offera 20% discount once in a while — imagine the affiliate's portion of that!

Hartmann isn't the only person banking on producing the Most Expensive Book In The World, however. Publisher Marilena Ferrari has produced a finely-done hand-made book documenting the life and works of Michaelangelo. The book has a hand-carved marble cover, a bas-relief of Madonna del la Scalla, and the interior are nicely-printed black-and-white lithographs of Michelangelo's works. There will only be 33 editions produced with the marble cover, at a price of €100,000.

Collectors, however, control the price of antiquties, and the true bearer of the Most Expensive Book In The World, one that actually sold at that price, is the 12th century book of Gospels of Prince Henry the Lion, which sold at Sotheby's for €16,000,000. The illuminated, 800-year-old book had made its way through various hands and wars over the years nearly intact, which makes it well worth the money — which I can't say the same for some philosopher-poet's 13-page booklet.

Re-Buying Books

This article really struck home for me: it's about when you're out browsing used book shops and find the perfect thing you were looking for…but then you get home and find one already on your bookshelf. Here's some examples from our book-buying outings:

Disclaimer: the Anne Roquelaure is not mine. The Complete Cheerful Cherubs, however, are. When I found A Fortune in the Junk Pile last weekend, I conferred with the Wifey because I thought we had it already. Wifey insisted no, but she'd written about it, so I figured I had some wires crossed with her article. Not a week later, I'm cleaning our office, and on the bottom of a stack of books, there it was. I have no idea when we bought it, or why it was in the office and nobody noticed, but we had certainly owned it for at least six months or more. Nigger by Dick Gregory is one that we've had to deliberately stop buying; we know we've got more than one copy of From The Back of the Bus, so we always assume we're missing the N-word one. Wifey and I have consiously told ourselves no more of those…having a shelf of that title might give people the wrong impression. We're not racist; we have poor memories.

The Book-Lover's Test

I didn't think I'd do as well at the book-lover's test as I did. See, I'm not a huge reader, and I've known some pretty obsessed readers, so I figured there'd be a lot of book-stuff I do that wouldn't be on the test. It does a good job of including readers, traders, sellers, and obsessive-compulsives, so there was plenty for me to check. My score: 62. That makes me a "minor-leaguer", which is actually 2nd Place.