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I would assume that every serious collector of books, everybody who has more than a few shelves full, has not read all of them.
Hey, no need to call me out like that!
🤔 Isn't reading them the point of collecting?
You seriously made me wonder :D
But still, even if they don't read them, they know they have them. So the collector and the seller know that such book exists and is somewhere out there and the owner knows they have such title in their stash
It's like pets or kids. Some people collect them as objects or status symbols and don't really care about them.
That went dark very fast. I appreciate :D
I've never considered someone buying books as status symbols. But I can see that happening
Some books I buy to read now. Some books I buy to read at an undefined "later." Browsing my shelves is exciting when I know there are books there that I've yet to really encounter.
Ok, sure. But you still buy them to read them
So you have never bought or inherited an old collection - large boxes rather than single books? "Going to sort them later..." :)
No :D
But then my question is, do we feel there are a lot of such collections? Or rather not?
To rephrase a little bit:
"Are there places where someone could pull off another Petrarch today?"
While my answer was related to Africa, as that's where I'm most familiar with a paucity of study and an excess of material, I'd bet even money that there are plenty of other non-European (and outside of the Americas) collections that have yet to be fully catalogued, especially in the Islamic World and India. I just couldn't swear to it or name any regions in particular to look into.
For sure I would also expect that the division line lies somewhere else than just one continent. But so far that's the only datapoint I have