Staircase/Library

Check out this cool staircase/library on Apartment Therapy.

Secret Library

Wow! A (mostly) secret library in a regular house! Okay, sure, the people who own it are probably fairly well-to-do since she wrote a series of books that were recently made into a movie, but still, its cool. It makes me feel like maybe someday I really will have my own secret library.

Thanks for the link, bookshelves of doom.

Haunted Libraries - Boo!

Haunted libraries from the Britannica Blog. (Thanks to Bookslut for the link.)

Any of you librarians out there have a ghost at your library?

Secret Rooms and Passages

WebUrbanist has a great story today about secret rooms and passages. Some of them are well-known, and most are kind of gory (like the secret murder room constructed by H. H. Holmes, which you can read all about in The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson). The coolest one, I think, is the secret bookcase door at the Mont Sainte-Odile convent library (see photo above). I definitely need one of these for my dream library!

My Library

As a follow-up to Lisa's comment to my previous post about keeping books, I thought I'd post some photos of my little "library." Okay, so its actually my dining room, but we use it for books much more than for eating, really. (Sorry for the awful quality of these photos!)

In addition to these three bookshelves (which are double-stacked and have piles on top, too), we also have two bookshelves in our living room.

(Yes, that's a replica of a human skull. No, we're not weirdos; my husband is an anatomy professor.)(Okay, we're a little weird, but not because of that.)

Our house is tiny, only 800 sq ft, so we go vertical as much as possible to fit all our books in. Someday I'll have a real library!

Rem Koolhaas & Howard Roark

The Seattle Times has an interview with Rem Koolhaas, who designed the Seattle Public Library, which opened four years ago. Its a great building, but that's not why I am posting the interview. My favorite part of the interview is this exchange:

Q: It was a large project to undertake when you had so much skepticism.

A: Yes, but of course we were not alone. And I think that is kind of actually one of the difficult and distorting things at the current moment, is that basically some architects are seen as kind of almost bullfighters who somehow have to kill an animal, but you're part of a much larger enterprise.

Q: I think there's a reason for that: too many people have read "The Fountainhead" and it's ruined them for life.

A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's actually extremely inconvenient, because there was Deborah (L. Jacobs, former City Librarian), of course, and there was also a board, and we had a lot of bonding in the beginning. So it's definitely not an ego thing, you know, and it's definitely not where you kind of are looking for morons or ever think that somebody — you realize that some of the criticism is unfounded or naive or not particularly kind of ... benevolent, but it really comes with the territory and it's not something that you kind of respond to in egotistical terms.

Don't get me wrong -- The Fountainhead is a great book. But, as alluded in my review of Loving Frank, it is a very particular view of architects and the act of building. It is, also, a very incorrect view. If even Rem Koolhaas -- who is probably (with, maybe, Frank Gehry) the closest thing we have in this day to Frank Lloyd Wright or Howard Roark -- thinks the idea of the "hero-architect" is a fallacy, I assure you the rest of us think its total B.S. It is fun to read, though.