Of course, if you live in the real country you will be able to use your
garden and your verandas as additional living-rooms. With a big
living-porch, the one indoor living-room may become a quiet library, for
instance. But if you haven't a garden or a sun-room, you should do all
in your power to bring the sunshine and gaiety into the living-room, and
take your books and quiet elsewhere. A library eight by ten feet, with
shelves all the way around and up and down, and two comfortable chairs,
and one or two windows, will be a most satisfactory library. If the room
is to be used for reading smallness doesn't matter, you see.
We Americans love books--popular books!--and we have had sense enough to
bring them into our living-rooms, and enjoy them. But when you begin
calling a room a library it should mean something more than a small
mahogany bookcase with a hundred volumes hidden behind glass doors. I
think there is nothing more amusing than the unused library of the
_nouveau riche_, the pretentious room with its monumental bookcases and
its slick area of glass doors and its thousands of unread volumes, caged
eternally in their indecent newness.
Some day when you have nothing better to do visit the _de luxe_ book
shops of some department store, and then visit a dusky old second hand
shop, and you will see what books can do! In the _de luxe_ shop they are
leathern covered things, gaudy and snobbish in their newness.
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