The Private Library

 
      My first room was a library, my parents’ living room having been converted from my grandparents’ library when the big house was divided up. There were oak bookcases on either side of the fireplace, with high mullioned doors that I could not at first determine how to open. It had tall windows facing the southeast, and an oriental carpet on the floor that we could belly down on; you would have known right away that it was a magic room. All libraries are magic rooms, and all library carpets are flying carpets. I am a lover of such rooms, and so I provide you with full disclosure: I write this surrounded by a great many books in elegant shelves. You will get no restraints or caution from me in the course of this exercise, unless it be in favor of limiting the floor-loading or against the bad taste of a rolling ladder on a six-foot shelf. I believe firmly that a private library is the one luxury in which a bookish person ought to indulge. This blog is intended as both a guide and a nudge, to help you think about your ideal private library and to encourage you to bring it triumphantly into being.

          We must, as Ms. Poppins notes, be very clear on one point. This is not a blog about book collecting. For two thousand years the word for library has referred not only to the collection of books, but also to the room, to the built environment. Sextus Pompeius Festus defines the word:

                                    Bibliothecae et apud Graecos at apud nos
                                    tam librorum magnus per se numerus
                                    quam locus ipse in quo libri collocati sunt appelatur.


                                    Library: means to us, as to the Greeks, both
                                    a large number of books as well as
                                    the place itself where the books are collected.

          The “place itself”, in the case of the private library, generally means a room in the house that has been set aside for the purpose, and this room and its lineaments are our subject. Susie West lamented that, “The various book research communities have not found much to say about the built environment and housing of books.”(1)  Oh, dear. I have tried not to err too far in the opposite direction, but the love of book space is an engaging love, and as Edith Wharton put it, “The housing of a great private library is one of the most interesting problems of interior architecture.”  So if this is another damn fat blog, and I am accused of scribbling, I can plead only the fascination of the subject.

          One might fairly ask, “But aren’t libraries disappearing anyway? Won’t we all have e-books, if we have books at all?” Sigh. At the time of this writing (in the early 21^st century), it is admittedly impossible to determine whether the physical book will last out the century, or indeed the decade. But of one thing I am certain – the physical book, and the physical private library, will endure for some of us, and not just for collectors. There is a particular feeling engendered by a bookroom that nothing else in the world provides. It is the reason the private library will endure, and it is the true subject of this book. It is that beneficent feeling of being wholly imbooked, beshelved, involumed, peribibliated, finally, enlibraried, a feeling that some of us will refuse to surrender to the virtual worldly schemes of increasingly high-tech innovators.

          The physical book is a tag, an instantiation, a marker, not just for a text, but for another world. It serves to remind you of that place, and of your last trip to it, or that you’ve never visited it but meant to. With what else could you surround yourself that could matter so much? If we had no physical books, we would paint their names in their places on our library walls so we would remember them when we entered the room.

          Cicero said “Nihil venustius quam illa tua pegmata….”, “Nothing could be more beautiful than your shelves….”  Most library owners I know, in spite of the many hours they spend reading in their bookrooms, have developed the habit of walking into them occasionally just for the feeling of deep satisfaction they get on entering. A library is not input, but immersion. “When I come into this library,” observed Mme. de Sévigné, “I cannot understand why I ever leave it.”

          Entering your library should feel like entering a hot tub, a magic store, the orchestra pit, your club, a chamber of curiosities, the circus, your cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend. It is a coming to center, or as Borges so perfectly put it, to Paradise.



(1) West, S., The Development of Libraries in Norfolk Country Houses, 1660-1830, unpublished thesis, University of East Anglia, 2000, p. 71.