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    For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library
    For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library
    For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library
    Ebook315 pages2 hours

    For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library

    By Thatcher Wine and Elizabeth Lane

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    About this ebook

    A celebration of the meaning and comfort printed books bring to our homes and lives, from the curation and design experts at Juniper Books.

    Explore the significance of the home library, embellished with alluring photography and illustrations, in a keepsake worthy of any bibliophile’s collection. For the Love of Books shares the vision of Juniper Books, a business that embraces the roles that books fulfill in our lives and their staying power. It recounts the history of books and private libraries, and champions the resilience of books in the digital era. Dive into the nuances that define books for reading, books for decoration, and books for inspiration. Instructive chapters provide useful details for creating and curating one’s own home library, whether it be a single shelf or multiple rooms each with their own collection. You will never look at your bookshelves the same way again.

    For the Love of Books is about storytelling beyond the pages of our favorite books. Our books—the ones we choose to keep—tell the story of who we are. They remind us who we once were and who we aspire to be.

    Thatcher Wine founded Juniper Books in 2001. The company creates custom libraries and has perfected the art of turning books inside out to allow for books to tell stories not just to us, but about us. Working with booklovers, homeowners, and designers, Juniper Books has provided the world with a fresh new approach to the printed book. Thatcher grew up in New York City where his parents owned and operated The Quilted Giraffe, one of the most innovative restaurants in America. Thatcher graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in history and art history and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

    Elizabeth Lane is the founder of Quarterlane, a quarterly subscription book service which merged with Juniper Books in 2018. She is also the book buyer for her local independent bookstore, Partners Village Store and Kitchen in Westport, Massachusetts. Prior to working in books, Elizabeth worked in contemporary visual art—in galleries, nonprofit initiatives and museums in New York, Austin, and Chicago. Elizabeth graduated from Davidson College with a degree in art history and received her masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGibbs Smith
    Release dateJun 2, 2020
    ISBN9781423652168
    For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library
    Author

    Thatcher Wine

    Thatcher Wine is the founder of Juniper Books, which creates custom book collections for purchase and designs custom libraries for a variety of clients. Thatcher and his company have been featured in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Departures.Juniper Books sets are regularly showcased in the gift guides of Oprah, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, Glamour and other magazines. Thatcher lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his family.

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      Book preview

      For the Love of Books - Thatcher Wine

      For the Love of Books

      DESIGNING AND CURATING A HOME LIBRARY

      Thatcher Wine & Elizabeth Lane OF JUNIPER BOOKS

      Digital Edition 1.0

      Text © 2019 Thatcher Wine and Elizabeth Lane

      Illustrations © 2019 Samantha Hahn

      Photographs © 2019 Juniper Books, except as noted

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

      Published by

      Gibbs Smith

      P.O. Box 667

      Layton, Utah 84041

      1.800.835.4993 orders

      www.gibbs-smith.com

      Cover design by Jenny Carrow

      Front cover photograph by Kylie Fitts

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

      Names: Wine, Thatcher, 1972- author. | Lane, Elizabeth (Bookseller), author. | Juniper Books (Boulder, Colo.)

      Title: For the love of books : designing and curating a home library / Thatcher Wine & Elizabeth Lane of Juniper Books.

      Description: Layton, Utah : Gibbs Smith, [2019]

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018060862 | ISBN 9781423652168 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Book collecting. | Private libraries. | Books in interior decoration.

      Classification: LCC Z987 .W497 2019 | DDC 002.075—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060862

      For Cedar and Jasmine, Edie and Emily

      Credit: Ursula Melhuish.

      Contents

      A Note to Our Readers

      Introduction

      Part One

      The Books We Keep, the Stories We Tell

      The Resilience of the Printed Book in the Digital Era

      Books in Our Homes—How Did They Get There?

      A Book, a Collection, or a Library?

      Books as Art

      Books About Your Hobbies and Interests

      Books for Children

      Part Two

      The Living Room

      Books in the Kitchen

      Books in the Dining Room and Alternate Spaces

      Books in the Bedrooms

      Books in the Children’s Rooms

      Part Three

      What Stays and What Goes

      Preparing to Rearrange Your Books or to Start a New Library

      Nearly Infinite Ways to Arrange the Same Books

      Step-by-Step: How to Style a Bookcase

      Reading the Books You Have

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      A Note to Our Readers

      You don’t have to be a voracious reader to love surrounding yourself with books or enjoy having books in your home. Books make us feel comfortable; they are sources of inspiration, information, and entertainment.

      If you are holding this book in your hands, odds are you already love books. Most likely, we’re not trying to convince you of a new hobby or interest. This book is more about identifying the meaning in it all—what all those books on your shelves say about you and what you can do to have them say a little more, more clearly.

      The ideas and images in this book are shared to inspire a more enriching life through books—both reading them and decorating with them. Perhaps they encourage you to bring more books into your home or to highlight what you already have in a new way. If the pages unfold and allow you to dream of possibilities never considered with books, we will be thrilled.

      In the fast-paced, digitally saturated, screen-overloaded era we live in, we believe that printed books are a refuge of space and time. It’s OK to slow down and read; it’s OK to fill your home and your shelves with printed books and to celebrate the comfort and meaning they provide in our lives. We believe it’s something that we all crave whether we know it or not.

      One final note before we get to the books. We believe that if you print something and it takes up physical space, it should be worth keeping forever. We hope that we’ve written and designed this book to be worthy of a space on your coffee table or bookshelves and that it becomes part of your story in the same way that your books are interwoven with who you are.

      +

      A room without books is like a body without a soul.

      —Marcus Tullius Cicero

      Introduction

      I’ve always loved books and being surrounded by books, but I didn’t originally set out to become a bookseller or work in the book trade.

      There were some early indications about my future career that I didn’t think much of at the time. When I was eight, I took an old book to Sotheby’s for a kids’ appraisal day. It turned out not to be worth much, but I made the local TV news—my first press appearance! They referred to me as Wine Thatcher, not the last time my name would be mixed up.

      I remember the day and the feeling I had when I finished reading Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story and had to begrudgingly hand it back over the counter to the school librarian. Not only did I come to the end of the book that was not supposed to end, but I couldn’t even keep my new favorite book on my shelves!

      Selling books began as a hobby for me in the summer of 2001. The online customer service company I had started ran out of money that year and I needed to figure out what to do next. I soon found that I loved telling the story of the books I held in my hands—mostly old books, antiquarian tomes with previous owners’ names and notes in the margins.

      From day one, what intrigued me the most about books was the infinite potential for storytelling that didn’t start or finish with the content on the pages. Authors have a backstory of their own and while they may write books, they generally don’t sell them. It’s up to others to tell the complete story about that specific book.

      As I sold more books and got requests to build collections for clients, I started thinking of how a group of books together on the shelf could tell an even bigger story. A collection of books said a lot about what the books had in common. They also reflected the interest and personality of the person whose shelf they were on.

      What I’ve realized over the past eighteen years is something that I think we all know—printed books are magic and they have unlimited potential to engage us. As we look at our shelves, we also sense that printed books have the ability to do all these things and more without even opening their covers. They tell a story whether their covers are open or shut, whether they are on the shelves or in our hands.

      I invite you to explore the possibilities of storytelling with books around your home as we take you on a journey that will hopefully enrich your life.

      Part One

      The Books We Keep, the Stories We Tell

      "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion starts her first essay in The White Album¹ with this sentence, detailing our human instinct to make sense of the incomprehensible, to link life’s naturally disparate scenes with a narrative thread. On instinct, we fill in the blanks to create stories and these stories then create our realities. Whether we know it or not, we are always telling stories.

      We share these stories in every moment in myriad ways; it’s human nature to do so. We live by these stories and extract our ways of being from them. We shape our experience through the lens of stories and often try to shape another’s experience through that same lens.

      For much of human history our stories were shared orally. Later, forms of writing appeared, followed by the creation of the alphabet, printing, and finally digitization and the internet. Words took flight on a global scale, bringing stories in increasingly efficient ways to a wider audience.

      This timeless urge to share our stories has sparked the greatest technological innovations, like writing, the alphabet, the printing press, and the internet, as mentioned above.

      Our stories have formed the foundation of civilizations, incited revolutions, and restored stability during times of unrest. Whether fiction or nonfiction, our history is indeed written in stories.

      However, our storytelling does not begin and end with words on a page. The idea that a collection of books or a library can tell the story not only of civilizations, but of us as individuals, is a theme that we will come back to many times throughout this book.

      For every printed book (or clay tablet, papyrus scroll, or hand-copied manuscript), the written word has proliferated from one person (the author) to many (the readers). The places where these works have been stored each contribute their own piece of the text’s story, whether it is a government repository, a spiritual archive, a community library, or a home bookshelf.

      The story of each place is unique. For example, a library that holds a first edition of The Great Gatsby has a different tale to tell than one that has the paperback edition circulated in high school classrooms. The location, how the book was acquired, and where the book is placed among other books and personal items all enhance our experience with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic work. The story is not just his—it is ours.

      We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria—which is our actual experience.

      —Joan Didion, The White Album

      When we add books—any printed books—to our homes and lives and make space for them, something almost alchemical happens. We combine the author and their story with who we are and our story. The combination of the author and their story plus us and our story is a new story, and it’s completely original.

      Like our DNA, the combination of books we keep cannot be replicated by anyone else. Even if others have the same book titles as us, their books have different meaning to them. By holding books in our hands for hours as we read them, we develop associations that last forever: where we were when we bought the books, who we were when we read the books, where we keep our books, and how we organize them.

      The books we keep are so much more than

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