Building a Home Library Worth Inheriting

Before there was interior design, there were books. The great private libraries of history — Montaigne's tower library in Périgord, Thomas Jefferson's at Monticello, the Rothschilds' at Waddesdon — were not decorative gestures but active intellectual environments. Their owners read in them, thought in them, and were defined by them.

The home library is currently enjoying a significant cultural moment, partly as a reaction to the digitisation of everything and partly because of a widespread recognition that physical books — their weight, their smell, their marginalia — are irreplaceable in ways that ebooks, for all their convenience, are not.

**Building the collection**: A library should represent what you have actually read and loved — not aspirational titles acquired for appearance. The most interesting private libraries are eclectic rather than encyclopaedic: a first edition of a beloved novel beside a recent cookbook, a shelf of travel writing above a row of poetry. Shakespeare and Company (shakespeareandcompany.com) in Paris and The Strand (strandbooks.com) in New York are among the world's great bookshops for deliberate, joyful acquisition.

**The physical experience**: Good reading requires good conditions. A comfortable chair — leather-upholstered, with a footstool — positioned beside a good floor lamp (OLight, daylight-balanced) and a side table at the right height. The room should be quiet, or contain only one sound: perhaps the crackle of a fire, or the ambient playlist from a curated ambient music source like The Quietus (thequietus.com).

**The curation imperative**: Edit regularly. Books you have read and will not return to can be donated to local libraries or to The Little Free Library movement (littlefreelibrary.org) — a beautiful community resource. A library of 300 treasured books is far more vital than one of 3,000 unread ones.

**The reading companion**: A well-made drink at the elbow. In the morning, coffee. In the evening, something with more ceremony — a small pour of Sauternes, a glass of Madeira, or — for the most civilised weekend afternoon reading session — a languid glass of champagne with a splash of blood orange juice, sipped between chapters.