This weekend I went to a massive book estate sale in the Rittenhouse neighborhood. A prominent lawyer who was really a polymath had passed away and an estate agency was selling his collection. His collected books reflected his interest in poetry, philosophy, ethics, political theory, classical art, history, and, perhaps more interestingly, botany, geology, the Swiss Alps, Newfoundland, cooking, and travel guides to “exotic” places.
The books I was able to recognize constituted the cannon of Western thought —Plato, Aristotles, the Scholastics, Chauncer, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Russell, and so on. So many of the classical books were translations and companions. Naturally, I defaulted to cgrabbing those of the Penguin Classics series and the Cambridge Companions, all running at $3 each!
However joyous I felt with so many of these books now as part of my library, I wonder how many of these will I actually read? How many shall I even glimpse at the table of contents? I suppose having a surplus of unread books is better than having no books at all, but I wonder if —given limited resources— it may be more intelligent to invest in a comfortable reading chair and a framed view. I really do believe activating an environment that processes or “consumes” from a collection is as important as accumulating assets —otherwise one ends up with endless acquisitions that the living person may never see.
It makes me wonder if most of these books collected by this prominent lawyer were actually read.