Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life Book

You could judge a collector by his collection! Hitler was a man better known for burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died, he owned an estimated 16,000 volumes - Ironic eh?! [He read voraciously].
Walter Banjamin once said that you could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interests, his habits. The books we retain and those we discard, those we read as well as those we decode not to, all say something about who we are. Quoting Hegel, Benjamin noted, "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight," and concluded, "Only in extinction is the collector comprehended."
Benjamin proposed that a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector, leading him to the following philosophic conceit: we collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector. "Not that they come alive in him," Benjamin posited. "It is he who lives in them.