In fact, nowhere in our homes is such an expanse of clutter (or collections, the more positive euphemism) accepted it is here that we proudly site our prized, ebonized Eastlake easels holding gilt-framed chromolithographs.

Within the gossamer haze of nostalgia, the library has become a repository for our collections of arcane clutter. 1880 Linthorpe teacup on a button-tufted Aesthetic chaise. With their beautiful bindings, old books are themselves objets d’art. A library is more than this! Technology has reduced the basic requirements of an office, but a library begs for space: for books, for furniture, for globes and maps and collections and decoration. But today an office requires nothing more than a laptop, a cell phone, and a file cabinet. A home library references the past as much as it does literature.įunctionally, the existence of a library is often rationalized as a home office. With a Cambridge accent, please: “Won’t you join me in the library?” As old-house dwellers, we dream of that line that one’s home should offer a chamber devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual delight sounds so nice, much better than “Let’s go in the den where I have paperbacks stuffed into some IKEA bookcases” (or “Let’s go in the den and watch ‘Survivor’”). 1880, which displays an equally ornate volume on the mysteries of Egypt, and sits appropriately in an early-20th-century Turkish room.

A bookstand is the sine qua non for a library, as with this elaborate, bejeweled and gilded metal stand ca.

Ilibrary in home