Wisdom, entertainment and bibliomania

THE library was—together with the drawing room and dining room—one of the three principal living interiors in the English Regency country house. It was an informal room, comfortably furnished and suited for the entertainment of a house party. For its owner, it provided occupation for a wet-weather day, not only reading or writing, but rearranging and cataloguing books, browsing and looking at prints, drawings, medals and coins.

In many of these particulars, the library as a living room was an important innovation. As Mark Purcell demonstrates in his groundbreaking history The Country House Library (2017), during the 17th and early 18th centuries, collections of books were often kept in small, private spaces, set apart as at Ham or Dunham Massey. At Arundel or Norfolk House in the first quarter of the 18th century, the libraries adjoined the secluded apartment of the private chaplain of the Duke of Norfolk), not the drawing rooms.

From the 1730s, however, book rooms became steadily more prominent, with examples such as William Kent’s library, planned as the centrepiece of the family wing at Holkham, or Lord Harley’s large library on the at Wimpole; both those houses, of