Home library

And yet there are clear benefits in a pandemic to having a private sanctuary programmed for escapism.

“The tactile connection to books and the need for places of refuge in the home, both for work and for personal well-being, have made libraries a renewed focus in residential design,” said Andrew Cogar, president of Historical Concepts, an architecture firm with offices in Atlanta and New York.

Morgan Munsey, who sells real estate for Compass in New York, has seen wellgroomed libraries in brownstones help spark bidding wars. “Even when I stage a house, I put books in them,” he said.

In “The Private Library,” Byers goes to the heart of why physical books continue to beguile us. Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders. Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.

“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend,” he writes. “It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.”

Byers coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library. The fusty spelling is no affectation, but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds.

So how many books does it take to feel book-wrapt? Byers cited a common belief that 1,000 is the minimum in any self-respecting home library. Then he quickly divided that number in half. Five hundred books ensure that a room “will begin to feel like a library,” he said. And even that number is negotiable. The library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, he said, was “very highly valued, though it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.”

“What’s 5 times 40?” Alice Waters, chef and food activist, recently asked. (The question was rhetorical.) “Two hundred, 400, 600, 800,” she calculated, apparently scanning the bookcases around her and adding up their contents (she was speaking on the phone). “And then probably another 800,” she said, referring to other rooms in her bungalow in Berkeley, California.

Yes, Waters, 77, who opened a new restaurant in Los Angeles called Lulu last month, is officially bookwrapt. She owns hundreds of cookbooks organized by cuisine, as well as volumes on farming, nutrition, education, environmental calamity, victory gardens, chef memoirs, French gastronomic terminology, art, architecture, design and fiction.

She uses a library ladder — her shelves rise that high. “But I’m not a reader, I’m a film person,” she said. “I like to be able to pull out a book and read a passage and be inspired.”

Reader or not, Waters’ sparrow-like style of dipping and hopping is, in Byers’ view, one of the great joys of library ownership. “The ability to browse among your books generates something completely new,” he said. “I like to think of it as a guaranteed cure for boredom.”

Masses of books, Byers said, represent “delights that we hold in possibility” — the joy of being able to lift a hand and tap unexplored worlds. (Because who among us has read every single book in our libraries?)

“I like to be in a room where I’ve read half the books, and I’d like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years,” he said.