> Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. The article also appears to be c

> Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. The article also appears to be conflating the number of books owned (or more precisely, being depicted as owning) with the number of books read, which is supremely, jaw-droppingly dumb: > We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old. To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all! How am I supposed to read this but as a claim that Jerome wrote more books than he read, based on a painting made a millennium after his death?