"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb"
About this Quote
His semiotic training is doing the heavy lifting here. “Signs that speak of other signs” is a compact description of language as a chain of references: words point to other words, definitions lean on more definitions, and only at the end do we gesture toward “things.” Eco’s subtext is that meaning is always mediated, never delivered raw. Reading isn’t passive reception; it’s interpretation, an active negotiation with a system that can never fully pin reality to the page.
Calling an unread book “dumb” lands with deliberate sting. It’s not anti-book; it’s anti-fetish. Eco is needling the collector’s mentality, the piety of owning classics like moral trophies, the institutional idea that cultural value exists independent of use. In the late 20th-century context - libraries as status, canons as gatekeeping, theory as a public brawl - he’s also defending the reader’s agency. The text isn’t a dictator; it’s a set of cues. The “good” of a book is not its prestige or its permanence, but the live event of someone making concepts from marks.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Eco, Umberto. (2026, January 15). The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-good-of-a-book-lies-in-its-being-read-a-book-105559/
Chicago Style
Eco, Umberto. "The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-good-of-a-book-lies-in-its-being-read-a-book-105559/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-good-of-a-book-lies-in-its-being-read-a-book-105559/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2026.
