Why keep a large library?

Umberto Eco walking through his 30,000 library to get a book he knows exactly where to find it is such a power move:

Some nerdy Economist writer: hE cAn’T hAvE rEaD aLl ThOsE bOoKs:

I’m a huge Umberto Eco fan, fiction and non-fiction.
But his private library – said to contain 30,000 books – is clearly nonsense.
That’s more than *a book a day every day of his adult life*. Can we please get a tiny bit serious?

All in defense of the idea that people only keep books to impress others, a dumb person’s idea of what would impress a clever person. Why would anybody be impressed by the mere fact you can write books written by much more smarter people than you (and the occasional numbnut)? But what struck me the most with this particular tweet from that thread was the sheer inability to understand what a personal library is for and how it functions. That idea that it should only contain the books you’re going to read immediately, that anything else is preening is just incomprehensible. Fair enough if that’s your personal preference, but beware that it’s a strange notion to have if you’re not forced to by matters of economics or convenience.

The entire thread has a very, ah, economist view of books in that they have to be useful and should be discarded if no longer so. It’s on a par with the prolier than thou leftie clickbaiter that you should sell or donate any books you have read or not planning to read right now because otherwise you’re hoarding. The assumption that you always know what you want to read or need to read and can plan accordingly and therefore you only need to keep those books to hand. Real life never works that way. And even if it did, insisting this is the only way to read is denying yourself the pleasures of choice, of having that freedom to say fuck it and read something else.

oh also, people have a comically phony number of books!
The dude in FT story has a library of 8000 books – has he been reading 2 books a week for 80 years??

A solid year of reading (say 50 books) = 90cm of bookshelf. So people with 100m of books are full of it.

Perhaps it’s just that you’re a slow reader if you think fifty books is a year’s worth of reading and that’s why you’re so amazed at libraries of thousands of books. But to think Umberto Eco, of all people, wouldn’t have been able to read all the books in his library? Not that he necesssarily had, as Eco knew the value of unread books. The incredulity at what are not that large libraries is hilarious, the misunderstanding that every book in it is meant to be read is dangerous. Not every book you buy needs to be read right away; not every book needs to be read at all. There’s a pleasure in simply having a book. Lords know I’ve bought books with no intention to read them. The greatest joy of any library is having books at hand to be able to read whenever you choose to. Especially if, like Umberto Eco, you grew up pre-internet when you either had to have them yourself or you had to hope the local library had them or you were out of luck…

Let’s just get rid of this idea that you have to justify why you keep a library or when or how you read. Just accept that people differ in how they read and that there’s more value in a library than it just having the books you need to read right now.