The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom

Abstract

There can be few significant private libraries the author Reid Byers has not enjoyed visiting. This personal experience enlivens his fascinating insight into the development of personal libraries and is supported by his wide reading around the subject, as evidenced in the extensive list of works cited at the end of his book. His career includes C language programmer, master IT architect, journalist, and TV newscaster. He is a member of the Grolier Club in New York and is vice president of the Baxter Society. He has directed or curated eighteen book exhibitions, and his publications include work on library archaeology. All of which appears to have provided the perfect grounding for writing The Private Library.Other titles, such as The Oxford Companion to the Book by Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, cover the history of books in greater detail but do not discuss architecture or benefit from as many floor plans and illustrations as Byers’s book. Book collecting is well provided for, with books ranging from the more practical ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter through to the more anecdotal A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes, with accounts of collectors prepared to go to any length, including murder, to satisfy their book lust. Few examine the physical structures of the libraries housing these collections and trace the evolution of their furnishings as Byers does. The books which do examine the architecture of libraries tend to have a narrower focus than Byers, for example, the more lavishly illustrated The Most Beautiful Libraries of the World by Jacques Bosser and Guillaume de Laubier and the more unwieldy The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries by Massimo Listri, which has many more sumptuous photographs but little explanatory text. Others favor specific periods and locations, such as The Country House Library and The Big House Library in Ireland: Books in Ulster Country Houses, both by Mark Purcell. The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, edited by Peter Hoare, dedicates three volumes to the history of collecting, organizing, and housing libraries in these countries and how they were influenced by other countries but devotes much less space to architecture than Byers. The closest alternative to Byers’s book would be The Library: A World History by James Campbell and Will Pryce, similarly based on personal visits to more than eighty libraries around the world and spanning ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Western libraries, but focusing more on photographic evidence without the same explanatory detail as Byers. None cover furnishings in as much detail as Byers’s appendices C and D or provide such detailed floor plans to aid in imagining the scale and layout of library environments from Roman times to the present. Attention to detail in each chapter includes where and how high windows were situated and whether they would face courtyards, gardens, or water features to provide an impression of the lighting. This enables the reader to envision what it would be like to use the libraries featured.Byers ambitiously guides the reader around the world and through many centuries without inflicting a dull sentence. A mainly chronological tour opens with the early libraries of Sumer and Babylon in chapter 1, speculating on how it would have felt to stand in a tiny room of clay tablets. In the second chapter Byers introduces his idea of a type-one library in Egypt and classical Greece, based on storage in a small space filled with boxes or chests, evolving to type-two libraries of the Roman Republic with small rooms lined with shelving, eventually becoming larger rooms with cabinets in recesses in the Roman Empire.Byers cogently argues that the evolution of the architecture and furnishing of libraries is clearly a reaction to the evolution of books, from the early clay tablets in baskets to mobile libraries housed in boxes used to transport small personal collections of scrolls to the more familiar shelving of bound books with spines facing outward. In chapters 5 and 6, covering medieval and Renaissance libraries, Byers suggests that gorgeous examples of the bookbinders’ art required new ways to store and display these precious gems, leading to the use of lecterns even in private homes. He provides a useful table of the size of private libraries, from those of monarchs and aristocratic individuals to commoners such as Chaucer and the small, private, professional collections of lawyers and physicians.Chapter 7 covers libraries in China, Japan, India, and Africa, although there are references to the influences of Eastern libraries in the chapters on Western libraries. Byers highlights differences such as Chinese private libraries tending to be more visible in public parts of homes, while in Japan they would be hidden away and much more private.Chapter 8, on English country house libraries, covers what is clearly one of Byers’s favorite periods and serves as an introduction to the fuller treatment in the following three chapters, where he describes and illustrates individual country house libraries. His focus is on wealthy individuals with space to build large houses and furnish them on a lavish scale. Byers suggests library environments evolved in reaction to societal changes and served as places for individuals or single families to study, read, and entertain chosen guests in physical comfort in ways unknown in public libraries. Small home libraries suited the need for privacy and, when reading was aloud, avoided irritating other household members. Once silent reading became accepted practice, larger communal reading areas flourished. He suggests private libraries began to look like public libraries and were used to flaunt the owner’s erudition and wealth. When books became expensive rarities exclusive to the wealthiest, private libraries retreated to the most private parts of homes. In chapter 9 Byers provides evidence that once printing presses and improved literacy extended the pleasures of reading to a wider audience, larger home libraries developed to satisfy seventeenth-century scholars’ needs; this chapter devotes more space to discussing furniture such as desks and library chairs. Byers suggests that ever taller shelving required ingenious solutions to reaching books safely, from library steps to metamorphic chairs. He notes that libraries moved to more public areas of houses, sometimes as waiting areas or shared spaces for entertainment such as music. Dual functions of quiet study and housing the family literature separated again, with small personal studies often adjoining larger libraries. Byers cites improvements in travel as leading to owners gleaning ideas for improving their own libraries, either from grand tours and public libraries or from house parties and more immediately relevant architecture.Buyers uses chapter 12 to look at the private libraries of the less wealthy but quickly reverts to grand houses such as Harewood. In chapter 13 he demonstrates that contemporary libraries generally resemble those of the eighteenth century, apart from a few notable arts and crafts examples. His illustrations focus on modern wealthy individuals’ private libraries. The final chapter looks at the effects of digitalization; Byers argues physical library spaces will not be entirely otiose, as minimum workspace furniture will still be required even for accessing digital texts, and cites evidence of a resurgence in the popularity of reading physical books as relief from digital screens and as aesthetically pleasing objects requiring somewhere to be stored and displayed.Color illustrations contribute to the pleasure of reading this book and sit as convenient examples beside the relevant parts of the text. The author has devoted a great amount of careful research, evident from the extensive list of works cited and anecdotes of personal visits, to provide evocative descriptions reminding readers to contemplate what these libraries would have been like when new and how it feels to be guided through them now. Thoughtfully, the author not only describes private libraries and shares gorgeous illustrations but also describes his delightful concept of how it feels to be “book-wrapt.”The Private Library is a rare achievement of informing interested amateurs without condescension while also offering valuable insights to librarians. The author captures and shares the emotional engagement of library owners and their satisfaction simply in walking into their libraries and browsing familiar titles. His theory that even modest homes can enjoy a library, for example in a spare bedroom, but it is the furnishing which distinguishes the right to call that room a library, forms the basis of his book. This is worthy of shelf space in any library, private or public.