Twenty-seven lakh people visited the 48th edition of the International Kolkata Book Fair that ended earlier this month. Lovers of books would be delighted to know that books worth Rs 25 crore were sold on the occasion. In 2024, the sales figure had touched a record 28 crore; the footfall last year, which stood at 29 lakh, had been a record as well. The data would undoubtedly reassure those concerned about the future of printed books.
But the bibliophile cannot ignore an itch.
The theme country of this year’s boimela was Germany.
It should have been Japan.
It should be Japan every year.
This is because the Japanese have a lyrical, lovely word for books that remain unread on the bibliophile’s bookshelf. It is called tsundoku and implies — justifies — the spontaneous act of buying books and then letting some of those titles pile up in a corner of the shelf, their pages unturned, without so much as a prick of the conscience. And who better than the bibliophile to revel in tsundoku’s quiet, non-judgemental embrace? After all, the conclusion of every boimela brings with it a delicate dilemma for the bookworm. In order to make space on an ever-shrinking bookshelf, he/she has to engage in a proverbial culling exercise and decide, in the process, which volumes are to be retained and which yet-to-be-read books are to be condemned to some forgotten corner of the house, banishing them from the shelter that the home library is supposed to be. Often, it is a tricky choice. This is because the decision to cull may not have anything to do with literary merit but with that all-too-human Achilles heel: sentiment. Should, for instance, a dog-eared, dense, unread yet precious copy of Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, a gift — picked up from a corner of College Street — from a scholarly, if a touch nervous, girl all those years ago make way for the mint-new, Booker-blessed Orbital? Mercifully, tsundoku’s spirit of gentle permissibility to house unread titles spares the bibliophile from having the blood of such books on the hands. The periodic guilty glance directed at the rising mound of books that may, in all probability, end up staying unread — the consequence of hours peering into the phone screen? — becomes redundant too.
Should the unread book on the shelf then be considered the proverbial poor cousin of the read book? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American author, would shake his head vigorously in disapproval. In his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Taleb christened the books that are fated to remain unread as proud occupants of the ‘Antilibrary’. “The library,” Taleb writes, “should contain as much of what you do not know… 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.”
The Antilibrary, so goes Taleb’s argument, derives its importance from its ability to expose an essential human fallacy: mankind’s tendency to accord greater priority to the known — the books read — than all that remains elusive — the heap of unread books. Taleb accords the Antilibrary with an essential responsibility: it should, he argues, serve as a reminder that knowledge, in its infinitesimalness, should not necessarily be perceived as a source of anxiety. Such a perception liberates the mind from the futile pursuit of wanting to know, possess, knowledge — be it in the form of the written word or otherwise. This realisation, in turn, purifies intellect, trading intellectual conceit for humility.
It must be pointed out that Taleb’s Antilibrary is capable of transcending its moral underpinnings: for it is armed with a distinct political edge. It challenges some of our most cherished ideals concerning the library, such as the library being an egalitarian refuge for books. Far from it, the Antilibrary, the repository of unread, ignored books, proves that the library, or its descendant, the modern bookshelf, is the product of a wilful, wily act of curation — selection — a means to, what the Roman philosopher, Seneca, dismissed as, fetishize erudition, the display of cerebral acumen. This lends to the library its element of intellectual hubris, its decorative shallowness. Instead of being a source of private intellectual nourishment from random reading, serious, selective reading acquires a tinge of elitism and the serious reader the touch of class. Virginia Woolf, for instance, had not been quite charitable towards the lay/pretend reader in her essay, “The Common Reader”, dismissing the average/common reader as “worse educated” and “superficial”.
Should Woolf’s dismissal of the ‘Common Reader’ be read as a criticism of unrefined literary taste? Or of literary fetishism? If it is the latter, one must point out that the pretentious reader is no historical aberration. In the Prologue to his essay, “Philobiblon”, which was published in the fourteenth century, Richard de Bury had declared that his “ecstatic love” for reading had led him to abandon “all thoughts of other earthly things.” William de Chambre, Richard’s biographer, swooned over the fact that in all of Richard’s residences, bed-chambers overflowed with books. It turns out though that Richard was an avid collector, rather than a voracious reader, of books: tellingly, “Philobiblon”, in spite of its promise of being the “earliest English treatise on the delights of literature”, had very little to say about Richard’s experiences of reading while, presumably, resting on his bed full of books.
Richard would be pleased — and Woolf horrified — to learn that the pretend reader is a burgeoning species today since reading’s perennially understated performative dimension has acquired an even more sinister shine in this Age of Social Media. With the worrying phenomenon of ‘readers’ remaining glued to Bookstagrammers’ babble on Instagram spreading like a rash, both the Library and the Antilibrary, two different kinds of shelter for the printed word, find themselves in the corner that was once reserved for the ignominious unread book.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in
