On Books and Displaying Them
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 01:48PM Displaying books has always been a bugbear of mine. I hoard them like gold, and I love to stare at them with nostalgic or anticipatory admiration, so no good shoving them into closets. I understand that books dress a room well, and having grown up in several houses that included walls of books, I appreciate their use as objects of design alongside their use as tools of enrichment.[H]omes have changed a great deal in the past two decades. Space is tighter. The front parlor is often the only parlor... So it has happened that books, of necessity, have become an inevitable part of the contemporary all-purpose living room… Integrating the library pleasantly into the home décor is a challenge that architects, designers and decorators have had to solve.
– from 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, 1956. (Design Observer, via The Husband)
But when the shelves begin to groan with two-deep layers of half- or yet-to-be-read novels, unused cookbooks, and the daunting biographies of great artists, I feel unsettled in my own home. Displaced. The books, they take over, spill over the side of my bed, rise like floodwaters in stacks of oddly-sized paperbacks and hardcovers. And boy do I ever find those stacks ugly. So much for being "respectable objects of design."
Lately, this has been much less of an issue. We've finally reached a point where we're happy with the quantity and quality of the shelving in our apartment in terms of both design and function. I've managed to purge the unnecessary books from my collection, and still keep it hefty enough so I feel as if I have my own personal library at hand.
The most important thing for me was to make sure that even the bookshelves leave some room for the rest of our lives, which includes so much more than books.
We have a recessed bookshelf on the main wall of our apartment - a feature present in every apartment in our 1940s-era building, making me think that books were standard in every New York middle class home at the time - which we've filled with our favorite books (the selection is forever in rotation) and framed black and white photographs The Husband took with his Lubitel in the South of France.
We recently inherited a set of mid-century ladder shelving from my in-laws which fills the back wall of the apartment with our oversized art books and more favorite novels, along with most of our vinyl collection, more framed photographs and prints, and an assortment of oddly illustrated boxes.
There's even talk of building a shelf to run around the bedroom ceiling, eliminating the occasional sad little toppling towers of books at my bedside, but to this I simply have to say: only if it looks good.