Since the upstairs bedroom that was our “study” has been converted for use as a bedroom by our daughter, and the fourth bedroom is remaining a bedroom so that we have someplace for guests to sleep (and somehow, we manage to have overnight guests at least a couple of times a month, so it’s worth it), we ended up converting the least-used remaining room downstairs into a library: the dining room. We still have the dining-room table in there, but it has two end drop-leaves and three middle leaves, so it can be made pretty small. And we have managed to have large family dinners with eight or ten people around the table; it was cramped, but we managed.
There are bookcases along three of the four walls; about 100 linear feet of shelf space, plus another ten feet or so of space on the top of four of the bookcases. The centerpiece, so to speak, in the middle of the long wall, is the barrister bookcase my father built for me. One bookcase is mostly my wife’s stuff, plus child-rearing and related matter, Judaica, cookbooks, and a few miscellaneous items. The next bookcase over has my science, history, political science, and miscellanea. The next bookcase is entirely fiction (with a few drama titles at the bottom). The upper shelf of the barrister bookcase is a little over half occupied with reference books; the rest of that shelf, plus all of the next shelf and a quarter or so of the next, is baseball stuff. The balance of that shelf is Shakespeare and Shax-related material. The bottom shelf is art, photography, comics, and a few other miscellaneous subjects. The next bookcase is poetry, top to bottom. The final bookcase has literary criticism (2 shelves), medieval studies (1.5 shelves), foreign language, pop culture, film, music, and a few more odds and ends.
The tops of four of the bookcases have a variety of other materials: pulp novels (Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, James Cain, etc.) and a few oddball items on the fiction case, a variety of college lit anthologies and stuff that didn’t fit elsewhere (the two-volume boxed set of Keats’ letters, the two-volume scholarly edition of the Arundel-Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, etc.) on top of the barrister bookcase. The top of the poetry case is pretty thoroughly taken up with books on typography, lettering, book arts, etc. I still have space on top of one of the remaining bookcases; the rest are tucked under a low-hanging ceiling, so there’s no room on top of them.
In the only corner of the room not occupied by bookcases, I have an old fabric-upholstered high-back chair that’s great for reading, with a swing-arm lamp next to it. We recently had framed a group of prints from a set my wife was given in her teaching days: they’re classroom posters from England, produced in the early fifties, each depicting a particular everyday scene, with as many everyday objects and activities as possible shown in them. The illustration style is very fifties, very textbook-looking; they’re screen printed on a very heavy canvas-textured coated paper in what passed for bright colors in the fifties: lots of yellows and greens and fleshtones. There’s one of a railway station with a very late Great Western steam locomotive that’s in my son’s room, a Devon seaside village scene (think Teignmouth or Shaldon) that’s in my daughter’s room, a London street scene in the living room, and in the dining room/library, an office scene – a guy at a desk, with a stenographer standing in a doorway behind him, half-turned away from the viewer, in an extremely tight skirt.
I do have a few more boxes of stuff up in the attic.
Ha! There are also a half dozen milk crates stuffed with high-quality magazines and other (softcover) reading materials in the living room constructing a desk for one of our PCs.