At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries [Hardcover]

Estelle Ellis (Author), Caroline Seebohm (Author), christopher simon sykes (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 1995

At Home with Books is a visual delight, a helpful resource, and an inspiration for every bibliophile with a growing home library. Includes professional advice on editing and categorizing your library; caring for your books; preserving, restoring, and storing rare books; finding out-of-print books; and choosing furniture, lighting, and shelving. Full-color photographs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For the bibliophile anxious to enhance the home library, At Home with Books presents both practical advice and divine inspiration. Chapters on starting a collection, organizing the library, and caring for books offer useful information on categorizing, editing, storage, and space-saving--"break down the books into categories by subject matter ... and compare their quantities to the available shelf space. If necessary, measure. Consider the book's height as well as its width. You may need to adjust your shelves to optimize your space." "Library Lighting," "The Art of the Bookshelf," and "Library Ladders" further encourage collectors to create a personal space suitable for its intended purpose, yet reflective of one's passion--"shelf lighting can draw attention to cherished objects and volumes; track lights can highlight certain areas of your room." Interspersed throughout these highly helpful chapters are interviews with noteworthy bibliophiles, including Keith Richards, Loren and Frances Rothschild, Bill Blass, and Paul Getty, whose "literary lairs"--ranging from the classic book-lined walls to books in the kitchen and the bathroom--are beautifully photographed, making At Home with Books not only a valuable resource for the dedicated collector, but a beautiful addition to any collection.

From Booklist

Less a book about libraries, as its Dewey classification asserts, than an interior-design album, this lavish tome yet stresses the importance of books in the lives of even the rich and famous, even when they're not writers. Oh, some whose book troves appear do write for a living: for instance, poet Richard Howard, whose small New York apartment walls are near-totally covered with books. Others whose entire names are famous include designer Bill Blass and Rolling Stone Keith Richards, but of the rest, a few just have impressive surnames (Rothschild, Getty, Biddle), one has a title (the duke of Devonshire), and the remainder have monikers as discreet as their fortunes are large. A terrific browsing book, thanks to Christopher Simon Sykes' tasteful photos, helpfully concluded by a resource directory of tony rare-book dealers, book fairs, bookbinders, sources of library furnishings, etc. Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 edition (October 31, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517595001
• ISBN-13: 978-0517595008
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 0.9 x 12.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Antiques & Collectibles > Books

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for the person who owns too many books, April 25, 2000

By 

Marcy L. Thompson (Sammamish, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries (Hardcover)

The last time I moved, I had the movers weigh our books. We hadover 5 1/2 tons of books.

When you live with a lot of books,they become, by default, a major theme in your decor. This lovely,wonderful book demonstrates ways to incorporate large quantities of books into your life in a way that is stylish and beautiful, but which also permits access to the book you just have to have in your hands, right this second.

The photographs demonstrate just what it means to be a bibiophile, and they provide inspiration to anyone wondering just how to deal with having too many books.

And in the end, feeling that I own too many books is a result of not having a reasonable way to store them all. This book provides ideas which made it possible for me to change my attitude -- no longer an owner of too many books, I am now a book lover at home with my books.

(Plus, reading this book reminds me that there are other people with large, well-read and well-loved libraries. If you are one of them, you will love this book.) END

59 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bibliophile's Delight, July 3, 2003

By 

Jeffery Steele (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries (Hardcover)

Where do you put hundreds, a thousand, even several thousand books? Here are some examples from book collectors, writers, and even a Rolling Stone.

"At Home with Books" highlights, with photos and text, more than two dozen offices, libraries, and studies in the U.S. and Great Britain, covering every kind of room where you might want to put a book. From large and impressive home libraries, where the books are more on display than they are for reading, to small offices, where ease-of-use is of key importance, to places where most people wouldn't even think of putting a lot of books, such as kitchens and hallways - nearly every kind of place where you might imagine a book is here.

Magnificent, stately rooms are included as well as the cramped quarters of a poet; the most post-modern designs imaginable to the most traditional. One of the more interesting parts in the book is the home library of Keith Richards, the guitarist for The Rolling Stones and, apparently, an inveterate reader. My personal favorite, though, was the author Frances Fitzgerald's library in her Manhattan apartment that she shares with her journalist husband. It was a room I could imagine putting my own books.

"At Home with Books" also includes useful information on how to care for your books, how to plan a layout for that future library you might build someday, and how to light your library. It has sections on bookplates and binding books, a resource directory on rare book dealers and the great libraries of the world. If you have any interest in books and the rooms they are found in, then look no further.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspirational for any book lover, May 23, 2006

By 

Esther Schindler (Scottsdale, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries (Hardcover)

Because few decorating books address the issues of designing a room for book storage and display, this one immediately appealed to me; perhaps I would get some ideas on how to manage my own collection. I have somewhere around 300 cookbooks, 500 SF/F novels, a few dozen books on writing, at least that many books on woodworking and quilting. All those books have to go SOMEwhere, and the room labeled "family room" on the house floor plan is now what we call the Library. That doesn't count the unpacked boxes of books for which we have no shelves.

However, my expectations were far exceeded.

This book shows a whole bunch of personal (and a few public) libraries, from tight little NYC apartments to huge homes. If you want inspiration on the ways to present your books, and how to intersperse them with other art collections you might own, the book is worth the money right there. And it's certainly great as a coffee-table book for the well-read. But what I didn't expect was how much farther it goes.

At Home With Books is essentially interviews with lots of pictures. Your eye will be drawn to the pictures ("Wow! People with more books than me!" or "This person actually had all his hardcovers bound in _white_ to match the decor?!") but the interviews themselves are often fascinating. You'll read the views of people who run book binderies, who have famous collections, who run a company that makes library ladders.

I got several bits of advice that I can put to use, from how to cull your collection when necessary; one suggestion is to give away the classics in paperback; you can always find another copy of War and Peace at the corner bookshop or in the public library. Another suggestion is to donate books to prisons, a "market" (if that's the right word here) that I had never contemplated. There are long sidebars on building bookshelves, on library lighting, on protecting books from fire and water damage. It's all enlightening and entertaining.

I'm sure that professional librarians will wipe drool off the cover of their own copy of this book. But if you find that you're trying to stuff another paperback onto an already-full shelf, you'll definitely love this book for yourself. Highly recommended.