In a video lasting just under a minute, the camera follows a slightly balding older man who walks through an apartment without stopping, holding a book in his right hand and passing one bookshelf after another until he finally stops at one point and pushes the book into a gap between other books.

This man was the literature professor and author Umberto Eco, who we know, among other things, for his bestseller The Name of the Rose, which was made into a movie. The apartment was his and we witnessed him going through his extensive private library of just over 50,000 books.

With 50,000 volumes, however, Eco was far behind the collection of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, which was estimated at over 300,000 copies. He answered the recurring question of whether he had read them all with a grin, adding that he had the unread books in his office at the university. In fact, Eco regarded his library as a working library in which books were used for reference. Of course, no one can read 50,000 books in a lifetime. In a long life like Eco’s, this would mean that he would have to read around 625 books a year from birth to death, i.e. two books a day. And you still have to live in between.

Umberto Eco’s library has a motivating effect on me. My goal in life is to gather such a treasure trove of knowledge in my own private library. How do I get there and what do I have to do? And that’s where things get hairy, as a little number crunching proves.

If I start from my rather measly 4,000 to 5,000 volumes and want to reach Umberto Eco’s figure, I have to increase my collection more than tenfold. Given that Eco, who died at the age of 84, lived the same amount of time, I still have just over 30 years left. That means I have to add at least 45,000 more books in thirty years, which means around 1,500 new books a year, or 125 books a month. With an average price of $20, I would have monthly expenses of $2,500. Also no easy task.

Am I a bibliomaniac or rather a tsundoku? This is the Japanese word for “the art of buying more books than you can read” or literally “piling up books to read”. While a tsundoku acquires books with a sincere desire to read them, a bibliomaniac is someone who creates a library to show off. The tsundoku is not interested in showing off, so he or she doesn’t care that the books are stacked and piled up, but a bibliomaniac does. Beautiful specimens are deliberately presented, the order to impress others is important.

Am I a tsundoku or a bibliomaniac? I’m probably a mixture, because I have both stacks of books, have them only roughly organized, and yet I like to present some books – here mainly French comics and illustrated books – by placing them on holders with the title page first to let the illustration take effect.

In any case, I don’t want to be pigeonholed here, or more appropriately: shelved. To be surrounded by his books and to wander over the spines and revel in the treasures of knowledge that could be hidden and opened up here is a pleasure in itself that needs no justification.