How sleazy would it be for me to go out and order all of the

>>8058386
0 Books is free

>>8058393
What?

>>8058386
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

Article very relevant. Basically a library should be acquired that consists of books you havent read to give it value, otherwise it is just for vanity.

IE go to used book stores and yard sales and buy books you havent read.

>>8058400
"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...

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head."

>>8058386
wish I were you, there's so many books I want to own... As for your question, buy only nice editions, Folio Society or Easton Press.

>>8058400
I've already admitted that though. I'm debating whether to do it or not for entirely superficial reasons

I suppose I could just buy unread books though

I like to have cheap copies of my favorite books so I can lend/gift them to friends or reread depending on the book.

It's not sleazy, and you'd have a nice collection of books, but that's what they'd be -- a collection, an ornament. Something that is only viewed, not used.

I buy physical books. After I read them I seperate them into books I would read again, and books I wouldn't. The books I wouldn't read again I sell to bookstores, or online.

>>8058400
>>8058405
Yeah just like you should only own physical copies of films you haven't seen.

What a pompous asshole.

>>8058386
It's not sleazy, as long as you like them.

I've been doing it lately. I don't necessarily have a plan to read them again, but I wanted to have them.

>>8058400
>>8058405
I don't understand this. I use a public library for books I haven't read. A private library is still valuable as a reference resource, but I use it more to reference things I have already read because then I can just pull it off my shelf at a moment's notice. I think >>8058957 has the right idea.

>>8058858
>Something that is only viewed, not used.
You never pull books you've read off your shelf to reference them?