How does one even go about reading 5000 books? I know it only says his library is 5000 books, but what's the point in amassing a library if you haven't read it? That would be nearly two books a week for 50 years. Imagine if even 5% of those were text books.
To cure you out of this vision of a library I would suggest you read Umberto Eco's essay "How to Justify a Private Library” in How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, it's great! In The Black Swan Taleb summarizes the lesson from this essay as:
"“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. 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. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”"
My mother was a librarian of a small library in a village in Scotland - from about the age of 13 she used to let me take the key and go and take books out myself any time I wanted (subject to the same rules as everyone else about number of books and keeping records).
I have a room filled with several thousand books I've read, an a shelf in my bedroom filled with several hundred books I bought to read later. Then I have 2 ebook readers with several hundred other books, some I've read, some I haven't read yet.
As a child, I've been pretty impressed the first time I've been to some friend's home where there was only a few books, the dictionary, the Guinness book of records and a couple of large, picture books that nobody ever reads. I was so alien to me; even at the age of 12 my bedroom had its longest wall entirely covered in bookshelves.
Same thing here. There is nothing worse than carrying my books in boxes and being afraid to unpack them because I move every 7-8 months. I have a reader, but the feeling is definitely not the same. I also tend to at least read the introduction of every book I think might be of interest even if I do not read it all. I am not reading a book per day, though, as Alan Kay; one per week (and a couple dozen introductions)is closer to my limits with 2 children at home.
I now listen to a lot of audiobooks - I only listen to the unabridged ones otherwise it feels like cheating. The big advantage being I can listen to them while walking to/from work and while doing other things like cooking - that's probably 2 hours a day.
[NB Audible is awesome - I particularly like how you can return a book if you don't like it, something I've only done a couple of times but is a great feature to have].
I think its a neat idea, but completely outdated. You can order a new book you need and get it within a day. A massive library of textbooks you can, at best, hope to glipse through for a few important bits of information, is a much larger financial investment. At that scale, you actually need an entire room devoted to containing your anti-library, taking dozens of hours to set up and organize.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could have books on difficult subjects like mathematics, philosophy, etc. and actually read 5000 of them in any contemplative way.
You could spend months alone reading, re-reading, consulting commentaries and attempting to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason alone.
And meanwhile, you can complete your reading and contemplating by reading other books - which is the point. 5000 books is not a huge amount if you're curious; for a more contemporary vision, think about the time you've spend browsing from one article to the other on wikipedia - or the web for the matter.
