1/24/2024 0 Comments Classic books for home libraryI make sure the spines are visible so I know what I’ve got,” she says. Piled up, they become furniture-footrests, coffee tables. Homes’s books threaten to take over her apartment, she packs up a carton and ships it off to her childhood home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where there’s more room. “Visitors tell us they could spend the rest of their lives in this room.” The family discovered the joy of eating in the library when they were renovating the kitchen now, they dine there once a week. Their eight-year-old son Lionel’s books are stashed on the second floor, near his bedroom. Along with books on architectural theory and practice, gardens, and cities, their library is the repository of family treasures: Dripps’s grandfather’s European architecture books, another grandfather’s collection of first editions by American poets and novelists, a Thomas Jefferson letter. Our world has to do with conversation and reading,” says Dripps. On a day too splendid to stay indoors, they can step through the French doors and read on the porch (take your pick: upstairs or downstairs) overlooking a garden: “We’re slightly idiosyncratic, I suppose. Robert Dripps and his wife, Lucia Phinney, both professors of architecture at the University of Virginia, find that the two-story library they added to their house at the foot of Afton Mountain is the center of their world. “Books-and the more the better-are the greatest asset to any room.” But he stressed that you don’t have to spend a fortune on bookshelves. For Cole Porter’s study, Baldwin designed open tubular-brass bookcases with ebony shelves, which he also used in his own apartment. “There isn’t a room in the house-including the bathroom-where books aren’t first-class decoration.” You can line an entrance hall with floor-to-ceiling shelves put a bookcase in a guest room turn a den, a bedroom, or a dining room into a library. “Books-and the more the better-are the greatest asset to any room,” Billy Baldwin wrote in his 1972 book, Bill Baldwin Decorates. It has occurred to me that if we could move into the Society Library on East 79th we might have enough space. Since we work at home, the need for having books here is obvious, but we never, no matter where we are, no matter how many new shelves we build, have enough space. There is in this room a big glass-topped garden table where my husband and I can spread out heavy books and just leave them. “We shelve some books,” says Didion, “according to no basis other than their having been in a certain room in a house where we no longer live-‘It was in the upstairs sitting room in Brentwood,’ say, translates into ‘Look first in my office.’ In what is according to the floor plan of this apartment the dining room, there are a lot of reference books-a full set of the Oxford English Dictionary, various editions of Who’s Who, and so forth. German poet and playwright Friedrich von Schiller’s library at his Weimar house.
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