Library Inspo
Where better to get inspiration for the library than from old photos of the same room?
The library at its peak capacity. Photo from Johns Hopkins.
Depending who you ask, the previous owner of our home had somewhere between 50 and 70 thousand books. That’s right, THOUSAND.
The photo above has been shared all over the internet, including a New York Times article about the viral photo itself. It’s a very odd feeling when you join a Zoom call and someone else’s Zoom background is the room you’re in (minus the books). The photo is also featured in books, blogs, and all over social media. There was even a fun blog exploring a hoax where the library was incorrectly attributed to Umberto Eco and located in Milan, but I can assure you (as did that mythbuster) that the library is certainly in Baltimore.
Sadly none of those books came with the house, so we’ve started over from almost scratch. We thought we had a lot of books until we started putting them up on shelves. A collection of 600 books looked pretty slim…
The library when the home was placed on the market.
You can see through the archways that there are actually two rooms. The room in the background is the “Stack room” and it was the garage when the Mackseys bought the home. They then converted the garage and added the main library. Wild to think someone could need all that space. The Library itself is 18’ by 26’ with 14’ ceilings, though the crown moulding does occupy the top foot or so. The stack room (shown below) is an additional 18’ by 22’ and had these two very large shelves (Stacks!) that protruded out from the back wall, but we have since removed those and installed a 12’ oak bar (See other posts!).
Stack room when we saw the home, husband for scale.
Another fun activity was actually putting the shelves back up. They were taken down to paint the walls behind the red you see in the photo above. We found them in the basement leaning against a few different walls. The shelf boards were labeled with a letter and number, but we didn’t know what these corresponded to! It took a little bit to figure out which corner would be the starting point, but luckily once we realized one vertical was much more narrow than the others, we started there. Turns out that vertical (shown above) is labeled “W” on the boards and the one immediately to the right fit the shelf boards marked “A” and voila!
Each vertical has space for 12 or 13 boards, depending how much space you want between them. But we have only just this month begun putting books on the upper portion of the verticals, above the ladder rail.
Dr. Macksey in the library, photo from JHU
Another shot of Dr. Macksey and his collection
Hopkins students attending class in the library with Dr. Macksey.
Now we have the fun but intimidating task of refilling the shelves. We’ve collected about two thousand more books since we moved in, mostly from donations from neighbors. I have also been buying books at auction and other used book shops.
We will never match the caliber of Dr. Macksey’s collection, but making progress!
Putting up our most recent haul of books.