Living with Books - A Problem We Should All Have!

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen wrote, “When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”  Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  Well I guess I’m in paradise because I have an excellent library in my house.

But I did not always have a library and I was faced with trying to figure out how to live among a lot of books.  I had books in every room!  And to add to my problem, I bought a couple of books detailing how people have tackled that problem:

Living with Books by Alan Powers has many photographs depicting ways to store books.  He shows them in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, home office, hallways, stairs, and, of course, in the library.

 At Home with Books:  How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries by Estelle Ellis, Caroline Seebohm, and Christopher Simon Sykes shows how 40 booklovers have created libraries for the books they love.

There are a few more titles I have come across and am thinking of adding:  Books Make a Home by Damian Thompson; Living with Books by Dominique Dupuich and Roland Beaufre;  Decorating with Books by Marie Proeller Hueston; Books Do Furnish a Room by Leslie Geddes-Brow; and Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books by Jo Steffens.  Are any of these worth purchasing?

Of course, I agree with Cicero that “A house without books is a body without soul” and with Horace Mann who said something similar:  “A house without books is like a room without windows.”  So having too many books is a problem we should all have.