To what end?

Recently, I was asked to recommend interior design books for a beginner's library. I rattled off a list of the names we all have on the tips of our tongues – Elsie de Wolfe, Syrie Maugham, Frances Elkins, Nancy Lancaster, Sister Parish, Jean-Michel Frank, Billy Baldwin, John Fowler, David Hicks, Albert Hadley and Mark Hampton. Eventually I wandered off, texting the bartender for another manhattan as I did so, and it occurred to me as I headed to the bar that, though a good list of names, I'd missed the point. Someone else that evening in our library during one of our cocktail parties had remarked how lucky I was to own all these books. Two manhattans in, the point I'd missed, whatever it was, eluded me momentarily – until my mind snagged on that word "lucky".

Indeed, but to what end? thought I, surprising myself with the force of it. I own each of the books on my quick list (and many more such monographs) and, irritated as I am to find it so, it took someone else's perfectly normal question to set me wondering why I actually do own and want to own so many books. To what end, precisely? Or, to be precise, what happens to them if, in the end, I no longer need them? How does one dismantle a lifetime's collection of books? Is it just so much paper that few, if anyone, would want?

I've mentioned before how the new president of a local for-profit university decided the modern student no longer needed books as "everything necessary is available online." He closed the library, deaccessioned everything, and at the time it seemed self-evident that it was to my benefit to have, at least, the books I'd ordered for the school library come into mine. After all, I was still teaching, would do so for the foreseeable future and I could use them for the blog. When, a few years later, I retire, that seemed yet another opportunity – I could spend golden years reading them all – visions of velvet smoking jacket-clad days spent in a paneled library, books piling (neatly) all over the place, creaking shelves reaching to the ceiling, the scents of leather and pot-pouri, the literary equivalent of new car smell, suffusing the room, all played in my head.

And, alas, it was almost to be, this bastion against the increasing tide of philistinism.

Despite illusion and delusion I continue to buy interior design books – though in fewer number than previously. Conversely, I delve into my shelves and stacks far more than ever I did for, perhaps not so surprisingly, they prove to be more satisfactory than what is available in stores.

If there is anything missing from my collection of books it is a coherent history of 20th-century and 21st-century decorating and design. A history of residential decoration could be cobbled together from the books I own, but if anyone were interested in design rather than decoration he would have slim pickings. Interior decoration, still a massive if shrunken industry, is but a tiny part of the national market – contract or commercial design taking the largest segment.

Thus, if I were asked again to suggest a beginner's library for an aspiring student of interior design I would recommend first reading Becoming an Interior Designer: A Guide to Careers in Design by Christine Piotrowski – an expensive and rather dry introduction to the business of design and the difference between decoration and design. Beyond that, I'd suggest books about architecture and historical styles – the golden oldie by Sir Bannister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. For furniture styles and the history thereof, I suggest John Moreley's The History of Furniture: Twenty-Five Centuries of Style and Design in the Western Tradition, and because its just fascinating, Geoffrey Beard's Upholsterers & Interior Furnishings in England, 1530 -1840.

For my neighbour who asked me for recommendations I would amend my original list to include both Morley's and Beard's books with the further addition of The Inspiration of the Past and The Search for a Style by John Cornforth to provide historical context for all the practitioners, both of yesterday and today, of traditional design.

Regarding residential design the following photograph will show you where my tastes lie and I can heartily recommend each of the books shown.

The photographs by Richard Felber of John Richardson's library/writing room are from the last issue of HG published in July 1993. I still miss House and Garden – besides The World of Interiors, still the best interiors magazine there was. It was replaced by Domino, of all things.

I kept that last issue for years but where it now is I've no idea. My friend Will Merril mailed me his copy for the article about John Richardson's library and to my joy I found also the last published article about one my circles-within-circles decorators, Antony Childs. More about him next time.

Poof!

Losing a post and comments as I did last week rather took me aback. The Twang's the Thang sorta went poof and retreated into the cloud whence I've daily been expecting it to reappear. I understood the Blogger team would restore data that was removed but precisely a week later it has not so I guess it's time to stop pouting and move on.

When the Celt suggested that we take our iPads on vacation rather than schlepp books as we would normally do, to my surprise I agreed with barely a demur - which means I refused point blank and then thought about it and admitted he was right. I'd like to say that is a syndrome I've grown out of over the years but, at best, I've just got quicker at admitting he's right.

Yet I didn't like the idea, however practical, because an e-book is not a book as I have known a book to be, and I like books. By which I mean, of course, I have a fetish about owning books - a fetish I find hard to admit despite the fact that, as I said in my post Soignée a couple of weeks ago, I sit surrounded by about 125 square feet of them in the room, once the second bedroom, we call the library.

It's a rather 19th-century name for a room of books, library, and one that smacks of municipal and philanthropic do-gooding. Book-room is even more archaic - on a par with looking-glass, though that fact has not stopped me using either on occasion. Whatever I call the room, if I were to lose its contents, my life would be bereft for I have great pride in ownership, great confidence in the emblematic and talismanic roles books play, and I take enormous pleasure in being able to take a book from our shelves, browse, read or research - precisely as I use the internet, it occurs to me.

My morning read is no longer a newspaper and neither is it, generally speaking, a book. I begin my day with a smile, a cup of coffee and The Daily Beast. Ten years ago, I read a book. Today I am more likely to be looking online and am constantly amazed at how much is available at the tip of a cursor and how much I rely on it - much as I relied on Blogger always being there.

I'm told everything is moving to the cloud, wherever that may be. I look out of the window and no evidence of the internet do I see but I'll take on trust that The Blue Remembered Hills are out there somewhere, floating. How aptly named this insubstantial vehicle. Losing a post is but the most minor of happenings in the technological scheme of things, but if that cloud ever goes poof .....

The room above is Emilio Terry's library at Chateau Rochecotte, photographed by Anthony Denney for Les réussites de la décoration française, 1950 - 1960, Collection Maison & Jardin, Condé Nast S.A. Editions de Pont Royal, 1960

No service, a plough and doin' awesome

Driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, as we did last Friday, without cell phone coverage, is a worrisome experience, especially for two citified men used to being available for texts and calls - few spoken conversations nowadays and increasingly more texts - twenty-four hours a day. It's not that anyone calls late at night, generally speaking, though when the phone does ring in the early hours it has the same force as did a telegram for a previous generation.

I'm not sure it's that great an advance of civilization this constant availability, but so used have I become to texting the Celt whilst at work - he's always first with asking what kind of day I'm having, and I'll text when I'm on the way home and, on occasion, as I did two weeks ago, call from the garage to ask he have a Manhattan ready for me when I got upstairs after such a frustrating day and a sixty-five mile drive  home - that I wonder if it is possible to live without a cell phone. We have not had a landline for about six years and both of us use our cell phones as our house phone. Even the concept of a house phone seems so archaic now, as it well it might, if you think how far the telephone has come since at the beginning of the twentieth century when it left its singular existence in the closet, sat for decades positively palpitating with self-importance on tables throughout the land- even, in the seventies having a little table designed for it by a hot-shot New York designer - and how only recently began its rapid diminution of size in inverse proportion to its growing status as a icon of cool. So social has the phone become that it frequently buddies up with flatware by the side of many a restaurant dinner plate.

We visited a friend whose bark-clad, book-rich house, one the most beautiful and personal I've ever been in, clings to the steep slope of a deeply wooded mountainside. He took us to houses he'd decorated, and from each The View - that great panorama of the Blue Ridge Mountains rimming the green gorge at Blowing Rock, one of America's greatest, and worthy of a few quiet moments and the attention of a nineteenth-century Luminist painter, spread out before us - as expansive as were the rooms in which we stood.

At night, without the pollution of city lighting, the skies above the Blue Ridge are full of stars - a moving sight to a man used to seeing nothing but the moon and Venus through the orange glow of Atlanta. The Plough, or Big Dipper as I know it now, seemed to be scooping the edge of the ridge we drove past on the way to a restaurant our friend had decorated - a towering, vaulted and beautifully lit volume walled and roofed with reclaimed barn siding, where one is met by a superb horse, a driftwood steed suitable for Marcus Aurelius - and the Pole Star visible as the Celt pointed out, if one traces a line directly above from the star at the right-hand of the bowl of the Dipper. Magical! As magical and moving as seeing the Milky Way overlaid with star after star through a break in the leaves of the tree shading the front of our friend's house. I want to tell you, the iPhone does not, cannot capture, the awesomeness of it all. Such a cliche that word awesome, as in I'm doin' awesome, thank you for asking, but what else suffices when faced with the visible universe - no longer the Aristotelian heavens but the great vault of heaven nonetheless?

I had intended to write again about Roderick Cameron but that I think might be a post post for another day.

First photo courtesy the Celt and the second, the panorama of Bass Lake, taken using my iPhone. The Celt put it together for me.