Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133110 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-31
• Released on: 1995-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

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

From the Inside Flap
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.

Customer Reviews

A book for the person who owns too many books
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

A Bibliophile's Delight
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.

Books or looks?
This is the same review I posted concerning the paperback edition; in fact I own the hardback, but the books' contents are the same. Only two stars here because the editors did not even bother to make an attractive binding: therefore, the hardback is not a good buy if you insist in having the book.

Having read some of the raving reviews here, and having read the book and possessing a very large library myself, I must say I was somewhat dismayed by the book's contents. The authors seem to try to illustrate many different kinds of libraries, studies and living rooms that function as libraries. This is all right, indeed, this is exactly what I expected. The only trouble is the choice.

Many of the photographed houses seem to have many books but not great book readers. The texts, themselves, give that impression. Also, why were almost only famous people's houses pictured - some of them almost without books at all? The house of a real bookworm is a very different thing from most of the pictured libraries.

If I may put it this way, I would have liked more emphases on books and less on looks. For instance, it is suggested that one might classify books by colour. For anyone that actually uses a library this is almost insulting. Other kind of advice ought to be given: what is the right height of a shelf, what are the more or less standard measures of books, and why this matters (because of space and aesthetic reasons).

Finally, a real book lover cares about bindings, first editions, and typefaces. There is not a single word about the actual "feel" of a book.
Perhaps this is just a very personal opinion. But, having lived with books all my life, I felt this book to be rather superficial. It does not delve into what a book is to its reader or how a book ages, what is different in han-dling incunabula, a Plantin book, a 19th Century small octavo or a modern hardcover or paperback.

I will not say that there were not one or two libraries with which I empathized. I did, in two or perhaps three cases. But the rest seemed about people showing their books off.