We Americans love books—­popular books!—­and we have had sense enough to bring them into our living-rooms, and enjoy them.  But when you begin calling a room a library it should mean something more than a small mahogany bookcase with a hundred volumes hidden behind glass doors.  I think there is nothing more amusing than the unused library of the nouveau riche, the pretentious room with its monumental bookcases and its slick area of glass doors and its thousands of unread volumes, caged eternally in their indecent newness.

Some day when you have nothing better to do visit the de luxe book shops of some department store, and then visit a dusky old second hand shop, and you will see what books can do!  In the de luxe shop they are leathern covered things, gaudy and snobbish in their newness.  In the old book shop they are books that have lived, books that invite you to browse.  You’d rather have them with all their germs and dust than the soulless tomes of uncut pages.  You can judge people pretty well by their books, and the wear and tear of them.

Open shelves are good enough for any house in these days of vacuum cleaners.  In the Bayard Thayer house I had the pleasure of furnishing a wonderful library of superb paneled walls of mahogany of a velvety softness, not the bright red wood of commerce.  The open bookshelves were architecturally planned, they filled shallow recesses in the wall, and when the books were placed upon them they formed a glowing tapestry of bindings, flush with the main wall.

I think the nicest living-room I know is the reading room of the Colony Club.  I never enjoyed making a room more, and when the Club was first opened I was delighted to hear one woman remark to another:  “Doesn’t it make you feel that it has been loved and lived in for years?”

The room is large and almost square.  The walls are paneled in cream and white, with the classic mantel and mirror treatment of the Adam period.  The large carpet rug is of one tone, a soft green blue.  The bookcases which run around the walls are of mahogany, as are the small, occasional tables, and the large table in the center of the room.  In this room I have successfully exploded the old theory that all furniture in a well planned room must be of the same kind!  In this room there are several Marlborough chairs, a davenport and a semi-circular fireside seat upholstered in a soft green leather, several chairs covered in a chintz of bird and blossom design, and other chairs covered with old English needle-work.  The effect is not discord, but harmony.  Perhaps it is not wise to advise the use of many colors and fabrics unless one has had experience in the combining of many tones and hues, but if you are careful to keep your walls and floors in subdued tones, you may have great license in the selecting of hangings and chair coverings and ornament.