The Unknown Unknown

If a bookshop contained every book ever written, what are the chances that you would find the one book you need? Well, they’d be perfect if you already knew what you needed, but, as I have been saying, that is not the point of a bookshop. That’s something for the internet. No, the perfect bookshop is small, small and selective.

It is a room (or two) where the unknown unknowns of the world are laid out on tables and stacked in shelves. It is a room (or two) where you can find what you never knew you wanted, where your desires can be perpetually expanded.

The internet takes your desires and spits them back out at you, consummated. You search, you put in the words you know, the things that were already on your mind, and it gives you back a book or a picture or a Wikipedia article. But that is all. The unknown unknown must be found otherwhere.

it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them.

There are, as he said, three kinds of books: the ones you’ve read, the ones you know you haven’t read (like War and Peace), and the others: the books you don’t know you don’t know.