Domestic bookrooms

If you have enough physical books, enough money, and enough space in your residence to have a "domestic bookroom", you may well find How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home? fascinating:

Mr. Byers1 coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library. The fusty spelling is no affectation, but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds.

I can think of people I know who will love this article and might aspire to this, but for all sorts of reasons to do with my finances and my circumstances - and how close technology has brought us to possession of2 a "personal library" I can hold in the palm of my hand - I just don't aspire to have my very own "domestic bookroom," so this sort of article leaves me slightly cold.

[Via Memex 1.1]


  1. Reid Byers, a computer systems architect who set out to build a private library at his home in Princeton, New Jersey and eventually published a book called The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom about that project which was the inspiration for this article. 
  2. I nearly wrote "ownership of", but Amazon and Apple and the majority of book publishers and their legions of lawyers are very clear on the fact that we don't own our ebooks unless they say so. I could own the room (but don't) yet I still wouldn't own the books in my personal library.