Shelf-respect: books you honor with shelf-space but don’t seriously mean to read. What are yours? Especially recent ones.
Usual suspects: Tufte, Knuth, Shakespeare, Rumi, Piketty, Bratton, Wolfram, Bible
It isn’t signaling, anti-library, or aspiration. It’s...idolatry?
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The value of a library isn’t the books you have read but the ones you haven’t (yet).
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That’s the Taleb anti-library concept I cited... and no that’s not what I’m talking about
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Iconologia by Ripa. But I do look through it from time to time, especially if I’m working on a specific piece of artwork
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The Lexicon of Freemasonry, because it looks far more interesting than it actually is, and the Lattimore translation of The Odyssey, because Wilson's supplants it.
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I just had this conversation with my wife: she keeps her theology books in case her children might want to read them.
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Gödel, Escher, Bach
Infinite Jest
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Sometimes, I even let people think I've read more than their first chapters. But I swear, I'll read them one day (or at least chapter 2 😉).
The stuff I actually read is on my Kindle
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Lewis Mumford. I never get very far into a city in history but it will always be on my shelf.








