Kevin and I love books. We have just one sad little bookshelf here in our flat, which holds those books of mine that I cannot live without, and others that we have bought between us since we moved in together. The rest of my books are in boxes in my parents’ loft and Kevin’s are all in boxes in a 5ft x 10ft lock-up in Maryland, USA.
I think one thing that we’re both really looking forward to, one day when we buy a place somewhere, is getting all of our books together in one spot and unpacking them in our own little library. Indeed, I’ve always wanted to have a library, and Kev has to, so I think that it’ll be one thing that’s definitely included in the plans for our house, when we get round to drawing them up.
Thank you, Stewart *
Turns out that we’re not alone in lusting after a library. An article in the Telegraph, Interiors: Rooms that lose none of their shelf life, (found via Shedworking) says that:
In the survey of 4,000 people, 15 per cent said they would like a library compared to 13 per cent wanting a gym, 9 per cent a music studio and just 8 per cent a home cinema.
That doesn’t really surprise me. Books are special things, they have a warmth and humanity lacking from many other physical objects. They have a smell that reminds me of childhood, and they are the instantiation of knowledge, discovery, and escape. Despite the invention of the ebook and ebook reader, I doubt that paper books will ever go away as a product, because collecting and displaying books is still, for some of us, a great joy.
Of course, you need some space to have a room designated specially as a library, but that doesn’t mean you can’t line the walls with books. My Aunty Stella, out in Sydney, Australia, discovered the last time that she moved house that she had 9 cubic metres of books. She discovered this because she packed them all into tea chests which are a metre tall, wide, and deep. She then discovered that a tea chest full of books is too heavy even for beefy Australian removals men to lift. When they weren’t in boxes, her books lined every spare wall in the house on shelves made of planks and bricks - a shelving technique I’ve used myself, but which requires one to have quite considerable faith in the strength of your floor.
If you don’t have enough space for a library, or to line your walls with shelves - we don’t, there are no spare walls in our flat at all - then you could always try the technique used by London couple, Leonie and Rhodri. In remodelling their top-floor flat, they converted their loft into a bedroom and put in a staircase that doubles as a library. (Lots more pictures in the Apartment Therapy gallery or on Gizmodo.)
Personally, I’d be scared of kicking the books, and of going arse over tit down such a steep staircase (it’s almost more ladder than stairs). Being left-handed and left-footed, I’d be likely to put the wrong foot on the wrong tread at the wrong time, and I hate to think what would happen next.
I’ve always had a bit of a thing for libraries that have an upper gallery, such as those you find in castles and stately homes. There’s something about having to go up a ladder, preferably a wrought iron one, to a little balcony in order to fetch down a book that appeals to the hopeless romantic in me. In such a library, the urge to cover remaining wall space in Jacquard tapestries and to have a carved limestone fireplace big enough to talk into would be almost too much to resist.
This gorgeous two-storey library just makes me drool uncontrollably. Kevin too.
Thank you, Champagne Chic
Can you imagine having such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? More to the point, can you imaging having the budget to have such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? Wow. I struggle a bit, but it gives me something to aspire to.
* This is so weird. Wherever possible I use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr on my blogs, and I reckon that about 50% of the time, the images I use turn out to be from people I know. In this case, not only do I know (vaguely) Stewart Butterfield, he also happens to be one of the people who started Flickr. But the fact that his photo was the first one to shop up on a CC search on ‘home library’ is entirely co-incidental. Obviously I just know a lot of good photographers who use Flickr and CC licences!
