Welcome to my Library

Step into my library, a space where knowledge meets imagination just as words meet mind and intangible worlds open up to become places we inhabit.

For me a library is a warm space insulated with shelf after shelf of books from floor to ceiling. In my mind there is snow on the ground outside or a garden in full bloom just like the one my grandfather’s library opened onto in my childhood. A fire crackles, another source of warmth but also a paradoxical reminder of the fragility of this passage between physical reality and the limitless worlds of books. Remember it was a fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria?

Perhaps it is because of that first library—where I’m told I would sit at my grandfather’s desk and scribble on blank sheets of paper, where he first noticed, with delight, before my parents, that I was left-handed—that I imagine all libraries must contain a well-built wooden desk but also a deep and comfortable chair or chaise in another corner, perhaps a round table surrounded by chairs where people can gather. It was into this type of space that I would retreat as a child and I still have remnants of that library.

My favorite places have been a chaise in my grandmother’s boudoir, a window seat above the garden, an overstuffed chair covered in gray wool, my childhood closet—which inexplicably but magically contained built in bookshelves in one corner—and now a chartreuse velveteen chair that I can curl up in. Even in sparser times I could stuff pillows into the corner where my bed met the wall in my first apartment and imagine my way back to my Ur-library.

Like books themselves this digital space is imaginary, and I invite you into my library—where right now I am, perhaps, at the desk penning this note—to imagine your own library exactly as you dream it, and to accept my small offerings to your library as I take books off my shelf and explore them here.

Reading is at once deeply personal, done in relative solitude and, at the same time, deeply communal as you escape into page after page of some other solitary individual dreaming that their words will one day reach your mind. Perhaps you are here to give a book to a loved one, to find something to nourish yourself, or to read before passing into the salon to talk over what you’ve read here.

Already preparations are underway, and if you’ll excuse me, I must go attend to my guests because I hear chattering in the halls, the clinking of champagne glasses, and the rustle of evening gowns as the first salon begins. I invite you to remain here and enjoy a selection of readings or to pass into the salon, which, tonight, is a gallery opening to inaugurate our mutual arrival at this time and place.