A great little book, published last May, that I came across in the Godert Walter bookstore in Groningen: Libraries of the Mind.

My mind was primed by E for this to stand out. Early August she pointed me to a posting about a man who had read 3600 books in 60 years, and had a list of them all which after his death was published online. Book lists online aren’t rare, and Swiss professor Beat Döbeli’s list of 8000 books and 30k texts is sort of the pinnacle of lists I know about. But the article E pointed me to got me thinking about lists. We have about 1.000 physical books in our house, I have a list of about 1.300 books I have notes about, and an e-book library of some 1.200 titles.

The physical books and e-books form an actual library, but my list of books I have notes about contains books I do not own, and books I have not read. They’re books I have notes about why I might read them sometime in the future. In Umberto Eco’s ‘anti-library’ fashion, they’re a reservoir of curated titles I can choose from in future.
All of those books together do comprise my mental image of ‘my library’.

Another 2.500 books or so, that I used to own, but did away with in 2012 and 2016, and of which there must be a list somewhere on one of my old laptops though I can’t find it, also make up part of that mental image of ‘my library’. So my mental library is perhaps over 4000 books?

Such mental libraries, is what the book ‘Libraries of the Mind’ is about, and when I came across it a few weeks after reading that link E shared with me, and having mused about the number of books that passed through this household over the years, I was primed to notice it.

A fun read. Libraries of the mind, our collection of impressions of books, are always bigger than the physical book collections themselves they are connected to. The book also goes into the dark matter of literature, all those books that were lost, written but never published, or tales told but never written down in the first place. The many works we can’t ever access due to language differences, and where translation itself moves the untranslated from view even more. I think from now on I need to start looking at other language online book stores to see what might be there. E.g. what has recently been published in e.g. Polish non-fiction that is of interest, and can I add an impression of that book to the library of my mind, even if I never will learn to read Polish?

But above all the book is about the joy of reading, the worlds and thoughts it provides access to.

Loved it.