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. In the old
book shop they are books that have lived, books that invite you to
browse. You'd rather have them with all their germs and dust than the
soulless tomes of uncut pages. You can judge people pretty well by their
books, and the wear and tear of them.

Open shelves are good enough for any house in these days of vacuum
cleaners. In the Bayard Thayer house I had the pleasure of furnishing a
wonderful library of superb paneled walls of mahogany of a velvety
softness, not the bright red wood of commerce. The open bookshelves were
architecturally planned, they filled shallow recesses in the wall, and
when the books were placed upon them they formed a glowing tapestry of
bindings, flush with the main wall.

I think the nicest living-room I know is the reading room of the Colony
Club. I never enjoyed making a room more, and when the Club was first
opened I was delighted to hear one woman remark to another: "Doesn't it
make you feel that it has been loved and lived in for years?"

The room is large and almost square. The walls are paneled in cream and
white, with the classic mantel and mirror treatment of the Adam period.
The large carpet rug is of one tone, a soft green blue. The bookcases
which run around the walls are of mahogany, as are the small, occasional
t