At Home with Books
 Estelle Ellis, Caroline Seebohm,
 Christopher Simon Sykes
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1995 Carol Southern Books
  ISBN: 0517595001

How Booklovers Live with & Care for Their Libraries. Our libraries express something more than learning, they link us with the past, the present & the future in a way that is portable, affordable & pleasing.

At Home with Books is a big book which shines some light on those magical rooms to show how a place filled with books can be a delight or intrigue according to the person who created them.

Long, long ago I had access to a library in an isolated West Country Georgian mansion in England & I would disappear there for hours; perusing its shelves of every National Geographic magazine to date; its collections of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Shakespeare in leather & gold bindings & its row upon row of Penguin Paperbacks & modern hardbacks. There were chairs of all kinds to sit or lay upon & an old tea caddy full of bookmarks.

Most of us have shelves upon which we store our best beloved volumes, some of us have cabinets full. Here is a host of serious book collectors who have devoted entire rooms with particularly made shelves to store their jewels of the mind.

At Home with Books is a big, colorfilled & absorbing meander through a selection of rarified libraries in the homes of such booklovers as John & Jane Stubbs; Paul Getty & Loren & Frances Rothschild & their grand passion for books.

Another chapter spotlights the Beautiful Bookscapes of Laurie Millet, Thomas Britt & Michele Oka Doner. Another focuses on the Designer Stacks of Bill Blass, Joan Vass & Paul & Herta Amir.

I found fascinating the chapters on: How to Organize your Library; How to Start a Collection; Library Lighting; The Art of the Bookshelf; Bookplates; Bookbinders and Conservationists; Enemies of Books.

Library Ladders is delightful & Keith Richards comments about reading as an anchor from his life on the road with The Rolling Stones are cogent & amusing.

The photographs of both books & rooms are evocative, atmospheric & full of detail & emphasize the booklovers passion that their homes are “more library than living place.”

Libraries are worlds within worlds within the mind & their focus is on the safe storage & comfortable reading of what lives there. All the libraries pictured are tidily cluttered, often ornately & opulently presented, sometimes Spartanly allocated with few other things to distract from the rows of books in Wall-to-Wall Books, Literary Lairs, Private Pleasures & English Country House Libraries.

The Reading Society Library in Corfu was a find!

Estelle Ellis, Carline Seebohm & Christopher Simon Sykes have put together a treasure; not exactly the definitive text book if you're looking for precise instructions, nonetheless, a lavish, flavorful collection of ideas, signposts & anecdotes with a fine Resource Directory & useful Index.

Estelle Ellis is a pioneering figure in the world of magazine publishing including Seventeen; Charm(later Glamour) & Home and Garden.
(10/15/02)

Rebecca