A Donkey, a Latrine, and 32,000 Books: Eco's Library Reopens
Umberto Eco owned enough books to make William Weaver — the man who translated The Name of the Rose into English and got rich enough off it to build a literal addition onto his Tuscan villa — feel like an amateur. Eco's collection ran past 32,000 volumes, sprawling across genres, languages, and centuries with the kind of appetite you'd expect from a man who wrote learnedly about both medieval theology and Charlie Brown. Ten years after his death, that collection has now been reassembled at the University of Bologna, where he taught for over three decades, and opened to the public as the Biblioteca Eco.
What makes it worth a special trip, rather than just a nice gesture to a great professor, is that they didn't just dump his books onto neutral shelves in alphabetical order. They rebuilt his shelving logic exactly as he left it — including his "good neighbor" principle, which meant deliberately placing unrelated books next to each other so that unexpected sparks could jump between them. A treatise on semiotics might sit beside a pulpy detective novel; a work of medieval philosophy might lean against a stack of comic books. This wasn't clutter. It was Eco's actual thinking process, externalized onto shelving — the same associative leaps that let him write a novel about monks and murder that somehow doubled as a meditation on the nature of interpretation itself.
The collection includes his rare book library, his working library subdivided by subject (ancient philosophy, translation theory, science fiction, the feuilleton — a very Eco spread), over 2,000 editions and translations of his own books, and a comic collection substantial enough to satisfy anyone who's read his surprisingly serious essay on Peanuts. Most of the volumes carry his personal bookplate: an image adapted from a sixteenth-century woodcut showing a donkey perched on a latrine, playing a pipe while a dozen monkeys dance around him. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of image a man devoted equally to high semiotic theory and low comic absurdity would choose to stamp inside his own books.
Eco once wrote in praise of the "antilibrary" — the pile of unread books on your shelf that represents everything you don't yet know, a monument to your own ignorance that keeps you honest and curious. Fittingly, his own library isn't finished being reassembled; the books from his country house have yet to be folded in. Which feels right. The best libraries, like the best minds, resist ever being fully closed.
Distilled from Open Culture