Have you ever thought about how many books have existed?
Have you ever thought about how many books could exist? If this number is infinite, is it countably so? What would Borges say?
There are all kinds of “how many” questions it’s fun to ponder when it comes to books:
- How many books have ever been published, in all of history?
- How many really good books are there? (What does this mean?)
- How many books exist that I should read? (What does this mean?)
- How many books exist that everyone should read? (What does this mean?)
Many of these are impossible questions, infinite questions, and that’s part of the fun. Some initial speculations, within an order of magnitude or two:
- I’d guess there are something like 100 million books ever published
- I’d guess perhaps 100 thousand of these are books we might qualify as really good
- I’d guess for any given person, we might identify at least 1 thousand books they “should” read
- 10 thousand is probably a rough upper limit of books to read in one lifetime
- 1 million might be an upper limit of books one person could reasonably be familiar with
Some estimates, via Google, indicate that roughly 130 million books have been published to date, and 1–2 million new ones come into existence every year. Given self-published books, or never-published manuscripts, the true number is likely higher.
For these extant books — humanity’s collective backlist — how does it break down by language? By historical era?
What fraction of such books have been translated, and into which languages, and how have these proportions shifted over time?
What does it mean for a book to be really good? Great? Timeless?
Books that are meaningful, enduring, universal, that teach something important, that convey a distinct experience, that otherwise offer something uniquely special…
Sometimes I dream of a place where one can learn about all great books; only great books — what the best books to ever exist are about and why they’re important.
I’ll write more later about the notion of “great” books; “best” books — but for now, want to put a stake in the ground that identifying and collecting such books might be a core goal of Antilibraries.
Consider: some books are in our antilibraries by choice (known and consciously unread), some by happenstance (known, and queued or forgotten).
Other books are in our antilibrary, personally or collectively, because they can’t not be — books only published in languages we don’t speak; books that have been destroyed; books that were planned but never written.
I find it fun to ponder if and how such lost or hypothetical books can exist on our antilibrary shelves.
What “how many books…” questions do you find interesting? Any tentative answers to proffer, or novel hypotheticals to add to the catalog?
I’d love to see your thoughts here.
Brendan