Reading Rooms

Are private libraries still part of the property dream? With everyone blathering at dinner parties about digitization and books becoming dots—the way they did in the 1800’s about the cotton reaper—and book-scanning stations in India and China transforming 100,000 pages a day, and then some robot in Silicon Valley laughing to itself as it scans 1,000 pages an hour, flipping with its robot fingers, and then of course more than 19,000 Project Gutenberg books already online (including the one that begins “It was a dark and stormy night”), and the very young with their laptops always on their laps, even at family dinners? Even my friend Smokey, who is 60, has banned all paper from his life and loves reading text on a screen because it makes the words “luminous.” But a private library is one of the age-old longings that, depending on the decade or century, have previously included moats, labyrinths, studios for painting people wearing turbans, swimming pools shaped like kidneys, rumpus rooms (with ping-pong or pool tables), decks and screening rooms. Library dreams are always dreams of wealth and privilege—“Sir Harold will see you in the library now”—or of sex with the furtive kiss, or of murder (there have been so many in libraries). There is also the consummate dream of safety: the young man on his bicycle, sun flickering through the trees, the snow on the path, the black trees, then going inside to the room with the very dark wood, where an older man asks him, “What is your thesis on?” The young man answers, “Enrico Panzacchi,” and the older man says, “Yes, of the Carducci School.” Then, later: “If you need anything—coffee, lemonade …. ” The younger man has come to a private library in the film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, set in 1936 Ferrara, because he is Jewish and no longer allowed to study at the university. Architect Peter Pennoyer designed a very Finzi-Contini library for the Upper East Side townhouse of Anthony Blumka, a medieval and Renaissance art dealer. Mr. Blumka—sitting nonchalantly near the gas fireplace on a 16th-century chair upholstered in pale pink and green Flemish tapestry (a little castle, a little pond), surrounded by books with titles like Sammlungen der Galerie Bachstitz—shrugged and said, “Look, it’s a working library. Literature is upstairs.” Mr. Blumka, who said his great-great-grandfather started the dealership in Vienna, interned at the Cloisters when he was 17. He has seen it all. How many people in New York have private libraries—a room designated just for books, in a city where no one has room for anything including themselves? No numbers are available, but Nancy Bass, co-owner of the Strand Bookstore, said that the store’s “book by the foot” program—putting libraries together for people’s homes—is up 130 percent since last year. She works on 100 to 150 libraries annually, the majority of them in Manhattan, though one big cosmetics mogul also required books-by-the-foot collections for his homes in Connecticut and Palm Beach. But a Wall Street man put only hand-chosen books in the eight-foot-wide, 34-foot-long library that he recently had constructed in his Soho apartment, which also has a gym and media room. “The owner spends all his spare moments reading fiction,” said architect Ed Ku, of the architectural firm Coffinier and Ku. “He needs always to have three shelves for the newcomers. It’s a library that’s alive.” Aren’t they all? Books breathing, falling, demanding to be dusted, crying out when their spines are injured, or when they fall and their pages fold—and what about the end of a relationship, and a boyfriend wet from the shower, hurrying to leave and dripping on the Oxford Book of Gardens (metaphoric, but it ruined the book)? One Manhattan architect said: “Look, today, often when people say they want a library, they have one book. ‘Library’ has become synonymous with ‘cozy’—and the room for the flat-screen TV.” But that’s just a segment of the population. Some people interviewed by phone said, “Oh, yes, we have a private library”—but then you get there and it turns out to be in their bedroom. The truth is, whether one has three shelves or a 1,250-square-foot room with 23-foot ceilings—like Donald and Patricia Oresman—there is never enough space, because books reproduce like rabbits. “Richard didn’t build it big enough,” said Mr. Oresman, 81, a corporate lawyer, about his Renaissance-inspired library, which is as large as one of his two apartments (down the hall from each other) in the Gainsborough building (built in 1905 for artists, for the northern light) on Central Park South, facing the soft, sweet tops of trees. Mr. Oresman was referring to his architects, Fairfax and Sammons, whose “most extreme case,” as libraries go, according to Anne Fairfax, was creating four for the Conrad Blacks in their 5,000-square-foot former apartment on Park Avenue—Soanian recesses, pilasters, dados and so on. The Oresmans have to keep their bottles of Sancerre on the floor, because there is just not enough room with the more than 2,000 books. Another 8,000 are still in the house in Larchmont, which used to belong to the late writer Phyllis McGinley (“Light verse,” said Mr. Oresman), who was once on the cover of Time—but now everyone only remembers Dorothy Parker. More books are coming into his New York library every day, because Mr. Oresman is flipping through book catalogs as madly as Walter Benjamin—“I’ll take that and that” (read Benjamin’s famous essay, “Unpacking My Library”). And now his wife Patricia, 83, a retired social worker, said they had to order little bookcases for the newcomers, and these two-shelf Mission-style cases are sitting like quiet guests in the room. There is also their art collection, more than 2,200 pieces—all of it involving people reading. No paintings of ships in a stormy sea or men on horses charging! “We are against war,” Mrs. Oresman said. “A lot of the works are W.P.A.; we found a lot of people reading in the Depression.” Makes one wonder if people read more when they are poor or feeling poor. The late critic and Columbia scholar Edward Said had a special 15-by-15-foot library built by James Sanders—the architect and also co-author of the Ric Burns documentary on New York—overlooking the Hudson on top of the Coliseum building, to which he enthusiastically added a green leather wing chair and his pipe library (about 50) and fountain pens. Said was unstoppable: He turned the rest of the rooms in the apartment into associate libraries, as evidenced by a recent visit. Multiple copies of his own works—he wrote some two dozen books and contributed essays to many others—were stacked under one of the two pianos in the music room. Now his wife, Mariam Said, is dealing not only with those books but also his archives—boxes sent over from Columbia and filling the room. Japanese scholar and Columbia professor Carol Gluck’s husband, Manhattan architect Peter Gluck, built her a magical library near their country house in Ulster County—700 square feet for 8,000 books, three-quarters of which are in Japanese, on the windowless, sun- and water-protected lower level. From there, stairs lead to the study, entirely glass, where Mrs. Gluck works on her own books at a fireslate desk. “All scholars in Japan have their own stacks,” Mrs. Gluck said, countering the elitist notion of a private library. “They have to; they don’t have the public access that we’re used to in U.S. libraries. We are spoiled in this country. We have public and research-university libraries that are open to everybody.”