Library of unread books

Last night when I couldn't sleep I took a book out of the library of books I haven't read, and started reading it.

A woman writer who'd lived a long, creative life, living in rural areas of Italy, Spain, and Greece in the 1970's & 80's, living as close as she could possibly live to pre-industrial time (drawing her water from a spring, foraging for food, cooking over a fire) wrote a book in which the reader is led to believe that the writer is both living a real life and living in a museum. And there I was at 3 a.m. reading it!

This is just one of the hundreds of titles in the library of unread books that have gone unread now for years and years and years, and will continue in their unreadness in perpetuity. Each book has been chosen for either its obscurity, its unreadability, or both; each book must evince some quality of defiance, a willingness at least to shed its cover and stand naked on the shelf. Unrecognized masterpieces of fiction and non-fiction are prominent as are the books of minor poets, monographs of painters and sculptors little known in their time but sure to be considered genius by the year 3003; there's also a small academic section of hand-typed doctoral theses', in boxed sets with the author's name written in fine calligraphic hand on the cover, sometimes overlooked by bibliophiles.

My librarian once made a promise: that if and when he acquired a new book for the library of unread books he would also remove a book. But he'd gone back on that promise long ago, no longer able to exercise the kind of executive perspicacity needed to differentiate the virtues of Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence from Gerhard Richter's Writings, 1961-2007.