Earlier this month, more than 32,000 books were opened to the public exactly as their owner left them. The Biblioteca Eco, the personal library of the novelist Umberto Eco, is now something you can walk into, shelf by shelf, and read the man by reading his rooms. It is a strange kind of publication: not a book, but the arrangement of thirty thousand of them. And it quietly raises a question that runs through much of this week's literary news, what does a collection of books actually say?
Eco understood better than almost anyone that a library is not storage; it is an argument. His novel The Name of the Rose sold so well that its English translator, William Weaver, could add an extension onto his Tuscan villa, which he named, with a wink, the "Eco Chamber." The joke lands because we all recognize the truth underneath it. The books we gather, and the order in which we keep them, slowly become a portrait of how we think.
To preserve Eco's library "exactly as he left them" is to preserve more than the titles. It keeps the adjacencies, which book leaned against which, the private logic that no catalog records. A shelf remembers its owner. That is why walking into someone's library can feel like reading their mind before they have said a word.