It’s no surprise that so many English country-house libraries are Classical in style. After all, every young nobleman would return from his Grand Tour knowing that ancient Rome and Greece were the wellsprings of the Western Enlightenment. Under a ceiling fresco of Apollo, god of truth and knowledge, the shelves would be structured like Doric columns – with dado cupboards and reeded uprights, the whole topped off with a cornice shelf dotted with busts of men (always men) of genius. Plan chests hold maps and engravings, while a globe evokes the geographical spread of knowledge. That the well-to-do tended to get books bound themselves in leather or buckram only added to the uniformity of the ‘look’.
WoI has trained its lens on many such interiors, of course, but we’ve also covered collections as singular as a Gutenberg first edition.
In October 2013, we travelled to Ningbo, to see China’s oldest intact library, the Tianyi Chamber, named to invoke water (so deterring fire, the natural enemy of books) and set up by a retired government official over 460 years ago. At Coimbra University, Portugal, meanwhile, bats flourish in its beautiful Baroque stacks. Enticed out by classical music, the fluttering mammals are encouraged to feast on the booklice and silverfish wreaking damage on the institution’s 250,000 historic volumes (WoI Sept 2020). We have covered colossal holdings, such as the British Library’s newspaper collection at Colindale, a (now defunct) Deco depository of 750 million periodical pages, all brass lamp stands and walnut reading desks (WoI Dec 2005). But we’ve also dipped into bijou reading nooks, from Furor Scribendi, a narrowboat-turned-library plying the Leeds & Liverpool canal and filled with short stories from independent publishers (WoI Oct 2021). Or the 1613 Kedermister Library, a perfectly preserved Jacobean jewel hidden within a private pew in a Berkshire church (WoI Nov 1981).
Ultimately, private libraries reflect their owners’ quirks. The writer John Fowles, for example, collected travel books, old murder trials and historical memoirs, while the diarist Samuel Pepys organised his 3,000-odd volumes strictly by size. Some libraries are meant to enhance social status. John Bunyan, writing in the 17th century, was severe about those who ‘take more pleasure in the number of, than the matter contained in, their books’. All libraries, however, are underpinned by aspiration, the desire to acquire ‘vegetable memory’, in Umberto Eco’s memorable phrase.
A version of this article appears in the illustrated A–Z of ‘The World of Interiors’, featured in our 500th issue (June 2024). Learn about our subscription offers
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