September, 19 21 
BOOK 
ROOMS OF BEAUTY AND 
53 
CHARM 
Some Suggestions for the Most Practical and Most Decorative 
Method of Storing Books 
ALDOUS HUXLEY 
I N most houses books are apt to 
be too much scattered. Each 
sitting room will have its book¬ 
shelf, and the overflow will find its 
way into the bedrooms. There is too 
often an unnecessary and generally 
hideous multiplication of small and 
flimsy pieces of furniture for the re¬ 
ception of books. As more books 
come into the house—and books are 
things that tend, insensibly but 
steadily, to increase and multiply 
with the passing years—the owners 
find themselves forced to acquire new 
receptacles to accommodate them. 
This is the wrong way of storing 
one’s books. The method is doubly 
inconvenient. When volumes are 
scattered by twos and threes, by 
dozens and scores, here and there 
over the whole house, it is often im¬ 
possible, without a great deal of un¬ 
necessary trouble, to lay one’s hand 
on any specific work at a given 
moment. To find one book, one 
may have to look through ten or a 
dozen bookshelves placed in as 
many rooms. The other undesir¬ 
able consequence of this method of 
storing books is that it leads, as we 
have already pointed out, to the 
multiplication of superfluous pieces 
of furniture. The presence of many 
little bookshelves dotted here and 
there all over the house gives a cer¬ 
tain air of restlessness. The books 
themselves, seen in small quanti¬ 
ties at a time, do not produce their 
full decorative effect; the little 
shelves are generally uninteresting, 
and often positively ugly. Every 
consideration, practical as well as 
esthetic, emphasizes the desira¬ 
bility of forming a book room or, 
at least, of turning a part of one of 
the ordinary living rooms into a 
storehouse for the accommodation 
of our literary possessions. 
Books as Furnishings 
The essence of a book room is 
that the shelves shall be a more or 
less constructional feature of the 
room. The presence of books in 
such a room is not fortuitous; they 
do not occupy a casual piece of 
furniture which might be removed 
at pleasure. No; the books and 
the shelves that accommodate them 
are an integral part of the room, 
almost an architectural, furnishing 
feature, like a window or a fireplace. 
Massed in a single room, one’s 
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An effective corner in the Spo- Circular top niches, flanking a 
kane home of J. A. Reinhardt. fireplace, afford an excellent 
Mrs. John Adson, decorator place for bookshelves 
books become orderly; it is possible 
to find the volume one requires with¬ 
out a lengthy search. At the same 
time the books are seen to their best 
effect, and a room of remarkable 
beauty and charm will have been 
created. 
We have spoken purposely of a 
book room, and not of a library, be¬ 
cause the words “book room” are the 
more intimate, the less solemn term. 
The distinction between the library 
and the book room is largely a mat¬ 
ter of size. The people who possess 
enough books—-several thousand at 
the least—to create a library on the 
grand scale are comparatively few. 
But innumerable households treasure 
the several hundred volumes which 
might be stored in a small and inti¬ 
mate book room. A library is a 
place in which one stores a great 
many books which one is never likely 
to want to read—books of refer¬ 
ence, old folios, complete works of 
writers once famous, but now, it 
must be confessed, a trifle dull. In 
a book room one keeps the books 
one likes to have always at hand, 
the books that one really reads. 
Shelf Spaces 
The book room in its most com¬ 
plete form is, of course, a miniature 
of the library, that is to say, a 
small instead of a large room, of 
which the walls are completely 
lined with shelves. In a great 
many rooms the projection of the 
chimney leaves two shallow re¬ 
cesses on either side of the fireplace 
which may easily be fitted with 
shelves. This will generally be 
found a particularly happy ar¬ 
rangement. The bookshelves on 
either side of the hearth serve to 
bring out the architectural qualities 
of the chimney piece. 
In houses where there are re¬ 
cessed cupboards in the walls, a 
very pleasing effect may be pro¬ 
duced by fitting one of these cup¬ 
boards with shelves, and turning it 
into a book cupboard. Niches may 
be treated similarly. Indeed, the 
problem of what to put in the niche 
is, perhaps, best solved in this way. 
One great advantage of the con¬ 
verted niche or cupboard is the fact 
that it can be provided with a 
glass door. Books, as any house¬ 
wife can tell you, collect dust at a 
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