Books do furnish a room

Cult US site Flavorwire recently produced a photo-feature on 20 beautiful bookshops from around the world, and it has since compiled a list of 20 beautiful private libraries. The sense of barely contained disorder contrasts with rooms that seem to have been arranged for a lifestyle magazine, such as the design by Sally Sirkin Lewis above.

It all goes to show that Lindsay Bagshaw, one of the characters in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, was right when he said that ‘books do furnish a room’. And they can furnish just about any room. The only photo missing from this selection is of that peculiarly English fascination: the bathroom library. No bachelor pad is complete without a collection of Private Eye annuals and a battered copy of England, their England lining the top of the cistern. My favourite photo of the collection, though, is this one of an unassuming library in a factory-conversion in Belgium.