- An antilibrary is a collection of unread books. The concept comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s *The Black Swan* — which is now in my personal antilibrary, hosted in Raindrop.
- Keeping an antilibrary gives you better perspective of what you don’t know; as [[Le Cunff, Anne-Laure]] put it: “…you are progressively turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns.”
- I’ve actively avoided having too big a backlog of “to be read” books, but I really appreciate this idea — especially after the mindset shift that I just need to stop expecting the proportion of unread books to decrease.
- Why does it matter if I have hundreds of books saved that I haven’t gotten around to reading? Not like anyone is keeping track!
- [[2024-09-14]]
- Thinking about this in relation to [[{5.5a} finding your voice is an external process]] — refining our voice, expanding our ideas, combining the right influences always *starts* by turning the unknown unknowns into *known* unknowns. That’s the ultimate purpose of an antilibrary.
- In other words, this isn’t mindless collection; building an anti-library is a method of *curation* relating to your own voice and work.
- [[2025-01-31]] the antilibrary is a tool in in the `input` stage of [[{5.5} the cycle of craft]]